Untitled - California State University, Long Beach

When one is exposed to Thomas Pynchon’s vast and complex 1973
novel Gravity’s Rainbow, he or she is soon made aware of its labyrinthine
and encyclopedic nature—hundreds of characters (including Pavlovian
psychiatrists, Argentine anarchists, missile-worshipping Hereros,
masochistic ghosts, and too many more) slip in and out of the text,
crisscrossing at any given time, while historiographic digressions of
subjects both grand and inane (from corporate instigation of WWII to
light bulb manufacturing) pull the reader deeper and deeper into the
paranoiac black hole of Pynchon’s text. Though most would-be readers
of Gravity’s Rainbow abstain from the book for this very reason (and
most who do attempt it put it down in early surrender), the few who
do fully subject themselves to Pynchon’s experiment (and you will come
out altered) are guided by a master writer through a darkly comical and
complex world only he could have created. It is popularly presumed that
the most complex object in Gravity’s Rainbow is also its focal point: the
V-2 rocket—a driving force that thrusts the characters into movement
as Tyrone Slothop and others search for the elusive rocket “00000.”
However, an animal study of the novel reveals a force that subverts the
monolithic symbolism of the rocket, counterbalancing 00000 in the
Zone: the pig. At the simplest polarization, the rocket obliterates life
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