I found this biblical allusion and following commentary very interesting and am going to attempt to venture an idea about it. If anybody would like to add, correct, or completely disagree with my musings, I would appreciate it!

On page 411, "Pokler, billeted at a fisherman's cottage, came in from his evening walks behind a fine mask of salt. Lot's wife. What disaster had he dared to look back on? He knew." This passage is alluding to the God's decimation of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament. Both cities were practicing various acts of sodomy and this enraged God. Therefore, he let Lot and his family (for they weren't part of the sodoming majority) flee from the land before he destroyed it.

As others have said before me, reading Gravity's Rainbow can be quite the chore. I too spent the first 150 pages chained to wikipedia looking up obscure references. At the same time, while I read the book, I feel as if I am watching an artist starting with a blank canvas painstakingly paint small little details as I try to guess how they contribute to the greater whole. Pynchon has a maddening habit of introducing seemlingly unrelated ideas and characters or breaks into a scene only to explain them pages down the road. For example, Pynchon explains the section where Slothrop flashes back to the Roseland Ballroom right after being injected with barbiturates (starting on p62) on page 74, where he notes that Slthrop was "willing to co under likght narcosis to help illuminate racial problems in his own country." While incredibly frustrating, the eventual explanations give me hope that slowly but surely, the novel is converging towards some level of coherence.