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)

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.