Gravity's Rainbow

Launch of a V-2 rocket

Part One: "Beyond the Zero": The opening pages of the novel follow Pirate Prentice, an employee of the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.), first in his dreams, and later around the house in wartime London that he shares with several others in the S.O.E. He soon is driven to the site of a V-2 rocket strike. Pirate's associate Teddy Bloat photographs a map depicting the sexual encounters of U.S. Army Lt. Tyrone Slothrop, an employee of a fictional technical intelligence unit, ACHTUNG. Slothrop and his background are detailed through discussions by some of his co-workers and through references to his family's history, reaching back to early colonial times, in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. (There are loose parallels to Pynchon's own family history.) Slothrop's (fictional) home town of Mingeborough is mentioned for the first time (although the town and a young boy named Hogan Slothrop had previously been featured in Pynchon's short story, "The Secret Integration"). That family setting will be mentioned several times much later in the novel, following the family's decline over time within a Puritan legacy of sterility and death.

Employees of a fictional top secret psychological warfare agency called PISCES, headquartered at a former insane asylum known as "The White Visitation", investigate Slothrop's map of his presumed sexual encounters in London, finding that each location appears to precede a V-2 rocket strike in the same place by several days. This coincidence intrigues Pavlovian behavioral psychologist Edward W. Pointsman, who thinks there may be a direct causal relationship between Slothrop's erections and the missile strikes, and his associate, statistician Roger Mexico, who suggests that the relationship is only a random coincidence of probabilities, as seen in Poisson distributions, leading to further reflections in this section and later on topics as broad as the occult, Determinism, the reverse flow of time, and the sexuality of the rocket itself. Pointsman is all the more intrigued to find that as a baby, Slothrop had been subjected to behavioral experiments conducted by a Dr. Laszlo Jamf that involved the stimulation of his penis to erections.

Many characters not significant until later are introduced in "Beyond the Zero", including one of Dr. Jamf's former students, Franz Pökler, a German engineer who has worked on early German experiments in rocketry and later on the V-2 rocket, and Pökler's wife Leni, a former student radical. Others who appear significant in Part One, such as Pointsman's associate Thomas Gwenhidwy and Roger Mexico's girlfriend Jessica Swanlake, vanish from the narrative and don't re-appear until much later. Indeed, most of the 400 named characters make only single appearances, serving merely to demonstrate the sheer scope of Pynchon's universe.[13] Character names sometimes consist of outrageous puns (such as "Joaquin Stick") but may also relate to particular traits of that character or to themes within the novel. Some names of historical characters also have thematic relevance. Under the influence of sodium amytal administered through Pointsman's maneuvers, Slothrop has a hallucinatory flashback to a scene in Boston's Roxbury district. References here include "Red, the Negro shoeshine boy," who will much later be known as the Black Power leader Malcolm X, and jazz saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, both of whom represent a threat to white racism. Another fictional character, Katje Borgesius, is contacted in this section by Pirate in order to bring her to safety from the Continent to England. Katje had been a Dutch double agent who infiltrated a V-2 rocket-launching battery commanded by a sadistic SS officer named Captain Blicero. Blicero had kept Katje and a young soldier named Gottfried as sex slaves in a perverse enactment of the Hansel and Gretel story. However, Blicero (a Teutonic name connoting Death) is also revealed to be the code name of a former Lieutenant Weissman ("White Man") who earlier appeared in Pynchon's first novel, V. He has had an ongoing but now-severed relationship with Enzian, a Herero he had brought to Germany from German South West Africa (now Namibia), and who is the leader of a group of Herero rocket technicians known as the Schwarzkommando, who had been helping Blicero in his own project to create and fire a rocket. Katje, on the other hand, will come under Pointsman's control in England, while, as the Christmas season ends, Roger Mexico worries about losing Jessica Swanlake to her other, bureaucratic and sedate, boyfriend, Jeremy (also referred to as "Beaver" because of his beard).

Part Two: "Une Perm au Casino Hermann Goering": Slothrop is sent away by his superiors under mysterious circumstances to a casino on the recently liberated French Riviera, in which almost the entirety of Part Two takes place. He is in fact being monitored by associates of Pointsman, including Katje and a linguist named Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. One of the more bizarre Pavlovian episodes involves the conditioning of octopus Grigori to attack Katje. Early in part two, the octopus attacks Katje on the beach in France, and Slothrop is "conveniently" at hand to rescue her. Katje and Slothrop eventually have sex. At the Casino, he learns of a rocket with the irregular serial number 00000 (Slothrop comments that the numbering system doesn't allow for four zeroes in one serial, let alone five), which features a mysterious component called the S-Gerät (short for Schwarzgerät, 'black device'), made out of the hitherto unknown plastic Imipolex G. It is hinted that Slothrop's prescience of rocket hits is due to being conditioned as an infant by the creator of Imipolex G, Laszlo Jamf. Later, the reality of this story is called into question, as is the very existence of Slothrop's original sexual exploits.

Meanwhile, at The White Visitation, Pointsman brings the unit and its mission under his control. The unit's nominal commander, Brigadier General Ernest Pudding, who is haunted by his traumatic memories of World War I, is brought to (literal) submission through sado-masochistic rituals with Katje, engineered by Pointsman.

Slothrop becomes increasingly paranoid, as old associates disappear. He begins to suspect he is being monitored and adopts the persona (one of many) of "Ian Scuffling," a British war correspondent. He escapes from the casino into "The Zone", the coalescing post-war wasteland of Europe, first to Nice in France and then to Switzerland, searching for the 00000 and S-Gerät. In the closing of Part Two, Katje is revealed to be safe in England, enjoying a day at the beach with Roger Mexico and Jessica, as well as Pointsman, who is in charge of Slothrop's furtive supervision. While unable to contact Slothrop (or prohibited from contacting him), Katje continues to follow his actions through Pointsman, who is showing greater signs of mental instability.

Part Three, "In The Zone": Slothrop's quest continues for some time as he meets or is chased by other characters, compared at various times to such characters as Orpheus and Wagner's Tannhauser. He learns more about his own past, Dr. Jamf's experiments on him, and his father's apparent complicity. In this section, Slothrop comes to doubt that his search for the S-Gerat is a Grail quest and finds his paranoia ("the fear that everything is connected") succumbing to "anti-paranoia" ("the fear that nothing is connected"). On the way he meets Geli Tripping, a self-described witch in love with a Russian colonel, Vaslav Tchitcherine, who had previously worked for the Soviet state bringing the New Turkic Alphabet to central Asia, especially Kazakhstan#Soviet Kazakhstan, where he had sought a mystical experience referred to as the "Kazakh Light". Slothrop and Geli have a near-mystical experience at the summit of the Brocken, the German mountain that was the setting for Walpurgisnacht in Goethe's Faust. Slothrop's travels bring him to Nordhausen, in Germany, and the Mittelwerk, where V-2 rockets were assembled using slave labor from the Dora concentration camp. Confronted by the racist American Major Duane Marvy, he escapes in a slapstick chase.

Slothrop meets members of the Schwarzkommando, a fictional cadre of African rocket technicians, descended from survivors of the Herero genocide of 1904 who were brought to Europe by German colonials. An extensive subplot details a schism within the Schwarzkommando; one faction is bent on a program of racial suicide, while the other finds mystical, semi-religious meaning in the V-2 rocket. Another long subplot details Tchitcherine's past and his quest to hunt and kill Enzian, leader of the latter group of Schwarzkommando and, it turns out, Tchitcherine's half-brother.

With papers identifying him as former German film star Max Schlepzig in Berlin, Slothrop adopts an operatic Viking costume with the horns removed from the helmet, making it look like a rocket nose-cone and is given the name "Rocketman". One of the people he meets is the American sailor Pig Bodine (who or whose ancestors appear in most of Pynchon's other works). Bodine commissions Slothrop to retrieve a large stash of hashish from the centre of the Potsdam Conference. In the nearby abandoned movie studio that was once the center of the German film industry, Slothrop meets Margherita (Greta) Erdmann, a former silent film actress from the era of German Expressionist film, now in physical and mental decline. Slothrop also comes to meet Gerhardt von Göll, a megalomaniac German director who had previously been seen in Britain, directing a fake propaganda film featuring Black soldiers in Germany. Von Göll is now involved in black market activities. In the longest episode of the book, we learn more of the history of Franz Pökler, who fathered a child, Ilse, with his wife Leni after being aroused by Greta's image in an erotic scene in Alpdrücken, von Göll's "masterpiece". Greta had also become pregnant in the filming of that scene, producing a daughter of her own, Bianca. While working on the V-2 project, Pökler had been coerced into working on the S-Gerät by Blicero, who was holding Ilse in a concentration camp, allowing her to visit Pökler only once a year. As Ilse ages over several years, however, Pökler becomes increasingly paranoid that she is really a series of impostors sent each year to mollify him. Pökler's work for Blicero is tied to the history of organic chemistry, with its own outcomes in the production of dyes and plastics and the international cartels that would come to control them, such as I.G. Farben, and a culture of death-in-life.

Slothrop is led by Margherita to northern Germany and onto the Anubis, a private yacht (named for the Egyptian god of the dead) filled with uninhibited European aristocrats. Here, Slothrop has sex with Margherita's teenage daughter, Bianca. Margherita, along with her partner, Thanatz, are revealed to know more about the 00000, S-Gerät, and Imipolex G than they let on. Ensign Morituri, a Japanese liaison officer, tells Slothrop about how Margherita and Thanatz had brought their traveling sado-masochistic act to Captain Blicero's rocket battery, from which Rocket 00000 had apparently been fired in the spring of 1945, towards the end of the war. Margherita spent many days in a mysterious and ambiguously described factory, where she was clothed in an outfit made from the "erotic" plastic Imipolex G. Slothrop falls overboard and is rescued by black marketeers heading towards Peenemünde, the test site for the V-2 rocket, now occupied by Soviet forces.

Slothrop later returns to the Anubis to find Bianca dead, possibly hastening his already hinted-at decline. He continues his pilgrimage through northern Germany, having changed clothing with Tchitcherine, arriving at Lüneberg Heath and the town of Cuxhaven, also sites of tests and launches by Allied forces of captured V-2 rockets. On the way, he again meets Major Marvy, who fails to recognize him. At a village festival, he is invited by children to don the costume of a pre-Christian Pig Hero, "Plechazunga." Meeting Pökler at the abandoned amusement park where Ilse used to meet her father, Slothrop finds out more about his childhood and the 00000. It becomes steadily apparent that Slothrop is connected to Laszlo Jamf through Lyle Bland, a Slothrop family friend who apparently played a role in funding Jamf's experiments on the infant Slothrop. Bland, in turn, is connected to many threads, including pinball machines and the Masons, that implicate him as part of an international conspiracy of industrial cartels.

Slothrop is introduced to and sleeps with Solange, a prostitute who is actually Leni Pökler, recently freed from a concentration camp herself. In the same building, Major Marvy has found Slothrop's pig costume and dons it, only to be caught, sedated, and castrated by agents working for Pointsman, who believe that Slothrop is still in the suit. Major political and social realignments have been taking place throughout The Zone. Towards the end of this section, several characters not seen since early in the novel make a return, including Pointsman, who is now in official disgrace, as bureaucratic operatives consider how to deal with him. Other characters, including Pirate Prentice and Katje Borgesius, begin to coalesce as a group styling itself as the "Counterforce" in resistance to the emerging post-war industrial-military complex.

Part Four: The Counterforce: Elements in this section become increasingly fantastic and sometimes self-referential, the narrator at one point saying, "You will want cause and effect. All right" (page 663 in the Viking edition) before explaining how certain events in Part 3 tie in. Despite the efforts of some to save him, Slothrop is repeatedly sidetracked until his persona fragments totally, more than one hundred pages before the novel's end. A flashback reveals how Roger Mexico, now in Germany, has come to join the Counterforce despite its inherent contradictions as a group organizing against international organizations. A long digression gives the story of "Byron the Bulb," a sentient, seemingly immortal lightbulb whose existence links with Dr. Jamf and his experiments and to the integration of power companies and their Grid to the network of cartels. The Schwarzkommando become reunited and finish construction of their own version of the 00000 rocket.

There are several brief, hallucinatory stories of comic, fallible superheroes; silly Kamikaze pilots; and an "Incident in the Transvestites' Toilet" where Slothrop has been hiding in drag. Such incidents may be products of Slothrop's finally collapsed mind; or of the increasingly chaotic state of affairs outside the realm of a rising technological class and society that comes to be labeled the "Raketen-Stadt" (Rocket-State) of the future. For Slothrop, these scenes more or less culminate with his finding, and failing to understand, a headline announcing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Tchitcherine is told by his superior officer that he is to head back to the U.S.S.R. with some German rocket scientists, despite his own misgivings about Marxist dialectics. A conference is held by members of the Counterforce, which now includes some with questionable pasts, personalities, or motives, such as von Göll. Jessica tells Roger that she is going to marry Jeremy/Beaver. Invited to a dinner at the home of a German industrialist, Roger and Pig Bodine manage to escape with the help of some disgusting culinary repartee, but it becomes increasingly clear that the Counterforce does not have the capacity to counter the emerging Rocket State, in part because "the Man has a branch office in each of our brains."

Some individuals, however, provide some hope. Earlier, Slothrop had encountered a young boy on what seems to be a futile quest to find his lost pet lemming. Meeting once again, it turns out that the lemming has been found. Geli Tripping's complete love for Tchitcherine and her connection with the natural organic world contrasts with a flashback in which Blicero explains to Gottfried his obsessive desire to transcend nature and "its cycle of infection and death." Geli does cast a spell on Tchitcherine that (perhaps) keeps him from recognizing Enzian when they finally meet, averting a potentially fatal encounter.

The final identification of Slothrop of any certainty is his picture on the cover of an album by obscure English band "The Fool" (another allusion to Tarot, which becomes increasingly significant), where he is credited as playing the harmonica and kazoo. The hundred pages or so of the novel include titled vignettes that summarize events in Slothrop's home town of Mingeborough; offer a (self-referential) reading of the Tarot cards for Weismann/Blicero, who also prepares for a final launch of the 00000 rocket with Gottfried in the nosecone; describe failed last-minute non-rescues by popular culture heroes; and allude to the Sacrifice of Isaac and the mythical figures of Apollo and Orpheus.

As the novel draws to an ambiguous close, the launch of the rocket with Gottfried is intercut with scenes contemporary to the novel's publication, at the (fictional) Orpheus (movie) Theater in Los Angeles, managed by a character named "Richard M. Zhlubb," a thinly-veiled parody of President Richard Nixon. Zhlubb is running a "Bengt Ekerot / Maria Casares Film Festival." Both actors played personifications of Death, in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, respectively, overt examples of several possible references in the novel to European modernist cinema. The novel concludes as a rocket (perhaps Weissman's) is frozen in its last moment of descent above the theater, where the film being projected has broken, and a hymn composed by Slothrop's heretical colonial ancestor, William Slothrop, is offered.

This image of Wernher von Braun is referred to in the narrative, giving a quite exact timeframe for some events in the book.

Poet L. E. Sissman, in his Gravity's Rainbow review for The New Yorker, said of Pynchon: "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drudged and drunken orgy."[14]

The plot of the novel is complex, containing over 400 characters and involving many different threads of narrative which intersect and weave around one another.[15] The recurring themes throughout the plot are the V-2 rocket, interplay between free will and Calvinistic predestination, breaking the cycle of nature, behavioral psychology, sexuality, paranoia and conspiracy theories such as the Phoebus cartel and the Illuminati. Gravity's Rainbow also draws heavily on themes that Pynchon had probably encountered at his work as a technical writer for Boeing, where he edited a support newsletter for the Bomarc Missile Program support unit. The Boeing archives are known to house a vast library of historical V-2 rocket documents, which were probably accessible to Pynchon. The novel is narrated by many distinct voices, a technique further developed in Pynchon's much later novel Against the Day. The style and tone of the voices vary widely: Some narrate the plot in a highly informal tone, some are more self-referential, and some might even break the fourth wall. Some voices narrate in drastically different formats, ranging from movie-script format to stream of consciousness prose.

The narrative contains numerous descriptions of illicit sexual encounters and drug use by the main characters and supporting cast, sandwiched between dense dialogues or reveries on historic, artistic, scientific, or philosophical subjects, interspersed with whimsical nonsense-poems and allusions to obscure facets of 1940s pop culture. Many of the recurring themes will be familiar to experienced Pynchon readers, including the singing of silly songs, recurring appearances of kazoos, and extensive discussion of paranoia. According to Richard Locke, megalomaniac paranoia is the "operative emotion" behind the novel,[16] and an increasingly central motivator for the many main characters. In many cases, this paranoia proves to be vindicated, as the many plots of the novel become increasingly interconnected, revolving around the identity and purpose of the elusive 00000 Rocket and Schwarzgerät. The novel becomes increasingly preoccupied with themes of Tarot, Paranoia, and Sacrifice. All three themes culminate in the novel's ending, and the epilogue of the many characters. The novel also features the character Pig Bodine, of Pynchon's novel V. Bodine would later become a recurring avatar of Pynchon's complex and interconnected fictional universe, making an appearance in nearly all of Pynchon's novels thereafter.

Several characters and situations from Pynchon's earlier works make at least brief appearances in the novel. Slothrop's (fictional) home town of Mingeborough, Massachusetts was the setting for his short story "The Secret Integration," which featured a young character named Hogan Slothrop, who in retrospect would seem to be Tyrone's nephew. Weismann (aka Blicero) and the story of the Herero genocide appeared in the chapter "Mondaugen's Story" in V. The eponymous character Kurt Mondaugen also reappears in Gravity's Rainbow. Some early reviewers even suggested that Gravity's Rainbow was a sequel to Pynchon's first novel, playing on the term "V-2".[17] In Gravity's Rainbow, Clayton "Bloody" Chiclitz is a toy manufacturer accompanying Major Marvy, but he appeared later as a defense contract magnate in The Crying of Lot 49, and his company. Yoyodyne, was introduced in V. Pig Bodine also appeared in V. but had his origin in Pynchon's early short story "Low-Lands." Bodine or variants on his name and character also appear in later Pynchon novels. A very minor character in Gravity's Rainbow, Ronald Cherrycoke, would seem to be a descendant of the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, who narrates Pynchon's later novel Mason & Dixon.

On the novel's publication in 1973, it was reviewed in the New York Times by Richard Locke under the headline "One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years". Locke compared Pynchon's writing to that of Vladimir Nabokov's, and that "its technical and verbal resources bring to mind Melville and Faulkner. Immersing himself in 'the destructive element' and exploring paranoia, entropy and the love of death as primary forces in the history of our time, Pynchon establishes his imaginative continuity with the great modernist writers of the early years of this century." Locke noted that "Pynchon is obviously capable of the most intricate literary structures--plots and counterplots and symbols that twist and tangle in time and space", but was less impressed by the novel's form: "the structure is strained beyond the breaking point. Reading it is often profoundly exasperating; the book is too long and dense; despite the cornucopia of brilliant details and grand themes, one's dominant feelings in the last one to two hundred pages are a mounting restlessness, fatigue and frustration."[18]

Reviewing the novel in the Saturday Review in March 1973, Richard Poirier stated that "At thirty-six, Pynchon has established himself as a novelist of major importance." In the highly positive review, Poirier compared Gravity's Rainbow to Moby Dick and Ulysses, and that it "marks an advance beyond either book in its treatment of cultural inheritance". Poirier noted the wide range of Pynchon's writing and said that "Pynchon is willing and able, that is, to work from a range of perspectives infinitely wider, more difficult to manage, more learned than any to be found elsewhere in contemporary literature. His genius resides in his capacity to see, to see feelingly, how these various perspectives, apparently so diverse and chaotic, are begotten of the same technology, the same supportive structures that have foundations in the theology of the seventeenth century and the science of the nineteenth." (...) "Pynchon is almost unbearably vulnerable to every aspect of contemporary experience, open to every form of sight and sound, democratically receptive to the most common and the most recondite signatures of things."[19]

On the 50th anniversary of the publication in February 2023, John Semley positively reviewed Gravity's Rainbow in Wired, noting that: "It is at once a busy almanac of its era and a sort of field guide for our own. It echoes eerily in the new-ish millennium. In a way, our own age's greasy stew of absurdity and apocalypticism, creeping death tinged with clown-shoe idiocy, suggests a world that has finally, fatefully, caught up with Pynchon. We are still living under Gravity’s Rainbow."[20]

The character name "Tyrone Slothrop" has been read as an anagram of "Sloth or Entropy" by writer Salman Rushdie.[21]

Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with cover art by Frank Miller, released October 31, 2006

The novel is regarded by many scholars as the greatest American novel published after the end of the Second World War,[6] and is "often considered as the postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel in general".[22] Literary scholar Tony Tanner has hailed it as "both one of the great historical novels of our time and arguably the most important literary text since Ulysses."[23]

Though the book won the National Book Award for 1974,[1] Pynchon chose neither to accept nor acknowledge this award. Thomas Guinzberg of the Viking Press suggested that the comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey accept the award on his behalf, to which Pynchon agreed.[24] Corey's comical address at the ceremony was also noteworthy for being interrupted by a streaker crossing the stage.[25][26]

Gravity's Rainbow has been translated to many languages, including French (as Rainbow, 1975), Spanish (as El arco iris de la gravedad, 1978), German (as Die Enden der Parabel, 1981) and Serbian (as Duga gravitacije, 2019). Episodes of the novel have been translated to Japanese.[23]

Gravity's Rainbow was translated into German by Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, and some critics think that it has had a large influence on Jelinek's own writing.[27]

• Cosmic bomb (phrase)
• Little Albert experiment
• Hysterical realism
• Metafiction
• Postmodern literature

• Mendelson, Edward (1976). "Gravity's Encyclopedia". In Levine, George; David Leverenz (eds.). Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Little, Brown. pp. 161–95.
  • Reprinted in Mendelson, Edward (1986). "Gravity's Encyclopedia". In Bloom, Harold (ed.). Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow: Modern Critical Interpretations. New Haven: Chelsea House. pp. 29–52.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Gravity's Rainbow.

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• Gravity's Rainbow Cover Art Over Time @ ThomasPynchon.com
• Gravity's Rainbow Wiki @ PynchonWiki.com
• Gravity's Rainbow review by Ted Gioia (Conceptual Fiction) Archived 2020-10-05 at the Wayback Machine
• "How to Identify a Gravity’s Rainbow First Edition: Hardcover and Paperback"
• A PDF map of how characters connect to each other in Gravity's Rainbow.