This is partly in response to the "Dialectics" post below, but I think this theme is prevalent enough in Gravity's Rainbow to merit its own post. Essentially, I think Pynchon exhibits a vehemently anti-dialectical sensibility. The word "dialectic" has become associated most readily with Hegel, a 19th century German philosopher who posited that History (with a notably capital "H") progresses according to a play of opposites: the "thesis" (an idea/structure/entity) meets its "antithesis" (something that opposes it) and the two come together, according to a dual logic of negation and elevation, as the "synthesis" (the resulting higher truth that is able to comprehend both as a unified totality). Science supposedly works like this: the theory of the times holds that the earth is the center of the universe (thesis), astronomical evidence contradicts the the theory (antithesis), and a higher-level explantion results. So according to Hegel, History is explicable by way of an analogous scientific process: two opposing ideas about how to structure the world come together, wrestle in the public arena, and ultimately are subsumed by something of a higher order - a more enlightened idea of how to structure the world that takes the good aspects of both initial ideas into account.

So what's the problem? Well according to this conceptualization of history, as time moves forward, things are necessarily getting better, which is highly problematic for agency. When Wimpe asks, "if History's changes are inevitable, why not not die?" he is reacting to this kind of dialectical reasoning (715). What kind of agency do I have if History will move forward inexorably whether or not I'm around? Remaining alive, then, becomes no more than incidental; the default state maintained because blowing your own brains out is just undue trouble, because, hey, why not live (or "not not die")? More to the point, this understanding of history also presumes that unification, or totalization, is desirable. The finish line for Hegel is the infamous End of History (again, note the caps), or telos, when no more antitheses exist, when we've produced a unifying theory of everything that couldn't possibly be contested on any grounds. We've been conditioned to think in these terms, but, if scrutinized, this vision becomes problematic to the point of just silly. Consider pleasure and pain: clearly we need both to appreciate either, but dialectical thinking makes it impossible to affirm both without trying to fold them into some higher whole; Hegelian reasoning can't accept that maybe the two should just exist in tact in and of themselves. Various other formulations, from the novel and otherwise, come to mind - drugs without the addiction, wealth without poverty, sex without guilt, sociality without power. These are all manifestations of the modernity's Utopian promise of retaining the good pole of the binary without the bad. "Life without death" is the paradigmatic example: immortality would completely unify life and death, thereby creating the ultimate "synthesis" of the dialectic. But it would also be the total sterilization of life. In fact, I think Pynchon's whole project in GR can, in some overly reductive sense, be thought of as a desperately passionate indictment of modernity's faux-Utopianisms. For if anyone could make immortality possible, could bring the modern project of teleological History to its completion, it would be Pynchon's elusive "Them;" but it would be the final step of Their hegemonic cooptation of everything - a blandly deterministic apocalypse.