One thing that I find interesting about Gravity’s Rainbow is that Pynchon not only incorporates historical and cultural allusions in his work, but that he also includes a great deal of scientific and mathematical allusions as well. In one of my favorite passages so far, Pynchon describes Pirate’s banana breakfast with the expected sensory vocabulary and with the unexpected vocabulary of biology, “[the] odor of Breakfast… taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror’s secret by which- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off- the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down twenty generations…”(10)

However this passage, like everything else Pynchon writes, is much deeper than the words. I like to see it as a kind of introduction to the rest of the book. Obviously in war, death is a prominent figure. In this passage, Pynchon seems to say that humanity (the “human face”) will be preserved by science (“living genetic chains”). And yet there is also mention of a “conjuror,” a person not normally associated with science. However, we are told that PIECES, an ostensibly scientific organization, consists of “clairvoyants and mad magicians, telekinetics, astral travelers, gatherers of light”(40), in addition to Mexico’s statistical work and Pointsman’s Pavalovian research.

We also see throughout the rest of the reading that there is a conflict or confusion between science, objectivity, humanity, and of course, the war. When examining the psychological tests of Slothrop, Pudding asks about tests for “Human values? Trust, honesty, love?” in which case the narrator responds, “No way, padre: the MMPI was developed about 1943. In the very heart of the War… All the MMPI appears to test for is whether a man will be a good or bad soldier.”(83) The stories of Slothrop, Katje and others beg the question- where does humanity belong in war?