I find it interesting how Pynchon portrays World War II. The common view would be that WWII was one of the most coherent wars, evil versus good, plain and simple. (I don’t really believe that, as a disclaimer). WWI, on the other hand, was murky and ridiculous and insane…rather like the Vietnam War. By focusing on the end of WWII, Pynchon manages to make it seem as stupid as Vietnam. The characters don’t seem to know why they are there, and do not seem to feel any real emotion in regards to winning or losing. In fact, it seems like most of the characters don’t really talk much about Hitler, or the Nazis…it’s not the issue. The rocket is the issue. Now, if one views the book as something about the Cold War then this makes sense…to look at it as a WWII novel doesn’t seem right. Ultimately it’s not about WWII at all…only in setting.

"Ah, they do bother him, these free women in their teens, their spirits are so contagious" and to the side of a 'song', the sidenote "Where did the swing band come from? She's bouncing up and down, she wants to be jitterbugged, he sees she wants to (italics) lose her gravity (end italics)" from page 547 (ya, I still don't know how to do italics...)

This seems to imply that teen women are spirited, and by the dance theme, happy. Teens may be the children of the war, seeing as we haven't actually been introduced to any children who didn't behave like teenagers if not adults. Even Bianca and Ilse, as far as I know the youngest characters, hardly have any child-like attributes. This would mean that teens are the most innocent of all the characters, which as we've talked about is not the case. A teen is also an age between child and adult, between a 0 and a 1.

Can anybody tell me what's going on in the section beginning with all the desserts in the "very extensive museum"(page 546) and ending with Katje and Pirate talking about loving people (page 558)....where are they and how did they get there? I'm really confused and I thought it might come up in class today and someone would mention it, but it didn't and I'm still lost.

The passage that starts on 564 concerning the lemming named Ursula is very interesting. It bring up several of the motifs we've explored in previous posts- suicide, being "passed over", etc.

"One lemming, kid?"
"I've had her for two years," he sobs, "she's been fine, she's never tried to-- I dont know. Somthing just came over her."
"Quit fooling. Lemmings never do anything alone. They need a crowd. Its gets contagious. You see, Ludwig, they overbreed, it goes in cycles, when ther are too many of them they panic and run off looking for food."

Slothrop finds it very hard to believe that Ludwig's lemmming would be the single lemming to survive the famously cliched mass-suicide of the lemmings.

This was originally a comment on rose's entry, but it got pretty lengthy, so I decided to go ahead and make it an entry of its own.

The idea of going "beyond the zero" (the title of the first part), seems to be a major theme, but I don't fully understand what this is supposed to mean. I realize that we've talked about this, but since I still don't feel like I really grasp the concept, I decided to list some of the most important zero references that we have come across so far, with the help of the website roses linked.

The book opens with Pirate's dream: "No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into--they go under archways...developing through those empty days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero..."

Overall, the companion is really helpful in reading Gravity's Rainbow. The basic plot points are there if you get a little lost, which is nice. But there are definitely parts of this book where I am looking at the plot and wondering "Why?" or "How did that happen?", and most of the time, I can't find the answers to those questions in the companion. The answers may be in the book itself somewhere, but flipping back through 600 pages to search for a possible explanation of probably trivial actions doesn't really work too well, I've discovered.

So I tried the old Internet approach, looking the book up on Sparknotes and Pinkmonkey, hoping to get some basic things about a couple of episodes that are beyond me solved. Neither site has this book. They have everything from the Odyssey to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but not this. The only internet summaries I could find that went by episode were all from one source, and simply consisted of quotes from the book...which wasn't helping me in the first place.

A continuation to Kodiak Sasha's post:

There's an important bit about the pigs on page 564-5 that I'm not really exactly sure what to make of in light of Slothrop taking up the pig suit.

Man in the Western World abides by the rules of the system, but in the colonies where he is free from the system, he may follow his natural impulses alone. "Christian Europe was death" (322) in the same way that the text constantly reminds us that the system fueling the war and its aftermath depends on death. To lose sight of death and indulge life in the colonies is to free oneself from that system.

I'm going to try out my close reading skills (that I'm not particularly confident about) here with a passage that particularly stuck me in the last section we read:

"Perfume, smoke, alcohol, and sweat glide though the house in turbulences too gentle to feel or see. It's a floating celebration no one's thought to adjourn: a victory party so permanent, so easy at gathering newcomer and old regular to itself, that who can say for sure which victory? which war?"(613).

It's interesting that of the four things that Pynchon mentions at the beginning of this excerpt, perfume and smoke are what I think of as vaporous. I suppose that perfume can be a liquid before sprayed, but in a party setting, I'd consider it a vapor drifting off a woman. Alcohol and sweat are, in "natural" form I suppose, liquids, although both can take on vaporous qualities. All of these things that are gliding through the house are thus mutable. But none of them can be felt or seen-- thus can they be smelled?

I know the idea of ones and zeros has been talked about before in both class and in the blog, though the only instance I can think of off the top of my head is regarding Roger Mexico being the in-between to Poinstman's ones and zeros. On page 410 the idea comes up again, this time relating to personal peace. "We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero." There are several very interesting things about this quote, one of which is the continuation of the one-zero theme. Also, I find it really strange that he would say that serenity=informationless, like ignorance is bliss. It's also funny because Pynchon goes on to say "Closest to zero among them all, perhaps, was the African Enzian"...I'm not entirely sure what the significance is of Enzian being "at peace" but I feel like there must be something.

"It is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here" (512). I laughed when I read this--it seems to sum up my thoughts about the novel in general pretty well.

I thought the differences in tone between the two scenes when Slothrop falls into the water were really interesting. The first time, Pynchon writes that "Slothrop dithers, goes to follow her--at the last moment some joker pulls the ladder up and the boat moves away, Slothrop screams, loses his balance and falls into the river"(467). This scene (although I'm sure not amusing for Slothrop) struck me as really humorous for some reason. Maybe it's Pynchon's use of the word "joker," or maybe it's the manner in which he fell, but I saw a decisive tone of amusement throughout that passage.