Often considered American author Thomas Pynchon's (1937-) masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow (1973) combines elements of science, sexuality, psychology, and technology to create a satirical novel that is a work of both historical and science fiction. Gravity's Rainbow is set toward the end of World War II and features an American character who has a peculiar relationship with the V-2 rockets launched by the Germans. Gravity's Rainbow analyzes several themes, including technology, power, paranoia, and identity.
Gravity's Rainbow Author
Gravity's Rainbow is the third and most celebrated novel written by Thomas Pynchon. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 1974 and was named one of the "All-Time 100 Greatest Novels" by Time Magazine. Gravity's Rainbow was also selected by the Pulitzer Prize jury to win in the fiction category in 1974, but the advisory board ultimately rejected it for being too offensive.
Pynchon drew some inspiration for Gravity's Rainbow from his family's history, as evident in the main character descending from Massachusetts colonists. Pynchon's ancestor, William Pynchon, immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 and founded Springfield, Massachusetts.
Fig. 1: Pynchon's ancestors were early colonialists and inspired Tyrone Slothrop's family background.
Pynchon also gained inspiration from his early studies of physics. This is especially apparent in discussing the V-2 rockets in the text, which includes a great deal of science and math. In 1953, Pynchon attended Cornell University to study engineering physics. He left school after his sophomore year to enlist in the Navy; upon his return in 1957, he switched his major to English. Nonetheless, his background in mathematics and science is apparent throughout the text.
Despite his celebrated contributions to American literature, Pynchon has never once granted an interview. Nearly all known pictures of Pynchon were taken during his college days. The National Inquirer stalked him for six months, hoping to get a picture (they finally snapped one while he was walking with his son to vote). So little is known about Pynchon's life that some readers have speculated he and J.D. Salinger are the same person. Now in his 80s, Pynchon continues to live a reclusive life in New York.
Gravity's Rainbow Characters
Gravity's Rainbow mentions about 400 characters by name, but the most important ones are Tyrone Slothrop, Captain Blicero, Katje Borgesius, Oberst Enzian, Edward Pointsman, and Major Marvy.
| Characters | Description |
| Tyrone Slothrop | The novel's protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop gradually loses his grip on reality and slips into paranoia. Slothrop is a soldier stationed in London at the end of World War II. He becomes the subject of a widespread investigation when members of PISCES realize rockets are dropped precisely where he last had an erection. It isn't clear if his erection causes the rockets to drop or if his erections happen because the rockets will be dropping; either way, he is interrogated, studied, and manipulated by PISCES agents. |
| Captain Blicero | Also known as Lieutenant Weissmann, Bilcero is a soldier in the German army. He took Enzian as his lover in West Africa during the Herrero uprising and then began a sadistic relationship with Katje and Gottfried as a Nazi. |
| Katje Borgesius | A Dutch woman, Katje Borgesius worked with the Nazis after her country was invaded during World War II. She became Bilcero's captive sex slave along with Gottfried. After escaping from Bilcero, Katje came to work with PISCES. One of her assignments is to seduce Slothrop after he saves her from an octopus. |
| Oberst Enzian | A South African man, Enzian leads the Schwarzkommando, a group of Hereros, in building their own rocket. He is determined to save and protect his people, even if he must become a martyr. He is also the half-brother of Tchitcherine, a Soviet officer. |
| Major Marvy | A racist American officer, Major Mavy takes a special interest in the rockets. Slothrop evades him and inadvertently leads to Marvy being castrated in the surgery meant for Slothrop. |
Gravity's Rainbow Summary
Each of the four parts of Gravity's Rainbow are broken into separate "episodes," as delineated by rows of squares. There are 73 episodes in the novel as a whole.
Part One: "Beyond the Zero" (21 episodes)
Set during the end of World War II, American soldier Tyrone Slothrop is stationed in London, where he monitors V-2 rocket attacks from the Germans. Unbeknownst to Slothrop, a secret government organization called the Firm has been tracking his sexual activity, which inexplicably syncs up with the bombings. Members of the PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender) section of the Firm, including Teddy Bloat and Pirate Prentice, have discovered that the locations of the bombings in London correspond to where Slothrop has recently had a sexual affair.
Dr. Edward Pointsman, who works for PISCES, believes the uncanny sexual correlation with the rockets is due to experimental testing Slothrop underwent as a baby. Slothrop's parents allowed the scientist Laszlo Jamf to experiment on Slothrop, conditioning him to have an erection to certain stimuli in exchange for a scholarship to Harvard when the child came of age. Although Pointsman wants to study Slothrop directly, his supervisors give him the octopus Grigori instead.
Fig. 2L Instead of directly studying Slothrop, Pointsman is given an octopus to train.
Members of PISCES interrogate Slothrop at their headquarters in the White Visitation, a former psychiatric hospital now dedicated to developing psychological weapons to use against the Nazis. Currently, researchers are attempting to discover how to shame the Germans using racial anxieties and the country's imperialistic past. They hope to drive divisions between Black German researchers and their Aryan counterparts.
Part Two: "Une Perm au Casino Hermann Goering" (8 episodes)
Slothrop's superiors send him to the French Riveria, where Katje Borgesius, an employee at the White Visitation, is given the assignment of seducing him. Katje came to the White Visitation after working with the Nazis and being forced into sexual slavery by a German officer named Blicero. Katje is introduced to Slothrop when agents of the White Meditation stage a ruse in which the octopus Grigori attacks Katje and Slothrop has to "save" her. Katje and Slothrop begin a sexual relationship.
Slothrop meets Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, an agent from the White Visitation, who teaches him about rockets. Slothrop later learns the Germans have a special rocket with the improbable serial number 00000 and a mysterious component called S-Gerät. He becomes obsessed with learning more about the rocket.
Fig. 3: The novel centers around the development and dispatch of V-2 rockets.
Part Three: "In the Zone" (32 episodes)
Slothrop becomes increasingly paranoid, suspecting a global conspiracy against him. Slothrop calls these forces "They," and They haunt him wherever he goes. Slothrop flees the military and finds refuge in "The Zone," a devastated post-war Europe. In Switzerland, he searches for information on the mysterious rocket and Laszlo Jamf's experiments.
Slothrop keeps traveling and meets an African man named Enzian, who is trying to build a rocket with other Herero scientists, and a witch named Geli Tripping, who is the lover of a dangerous Russian colonel named Tchitcherine. Slothrop tours rocket factories where the V-2 rockets were assembled. He continues on his quest.
Slothrop eventually meets a silent film actress named Margherita, who knows more about the 00000 rocket than she lets on. She takes him on a private yacht, where the passengers spontaneously engage in a massive orgy. During this time, Slothrop has sex with Margherita's teenage daughter, Bianca. Slothrop falls overboard but is rescued and taken to Peenemünde, the Soviet-occupied rocket launch site. When he returns to the boat, he finds Bianca dead.
Fig. 4: Slothrop spends time with a film actress on a yacht.
Slothrop learns more about his childhood and helps to save Enzian's men from an American man named Major Marvy, who was working with Tchitcherine to attack them. Slothrop participates in a festival in which he wears a pig costume. Afterward, he goes to a brothel where he has sex with a prostitute. Marvy is in the same building and puts on the pig costume right before the establishment is raided by the police. Agents working for Pointsman mistakenly abduct and castrate Marvy, thinking it is Slothrop in the costume. Pointsman is forced to resign in disgrace because of the blunder.
Part Four: The Counterforce (12 episodes)
Meanwhile, Katje and Pirate join a rebel faction in the White Visitation that comes to be called the counterforce. Set in opposition to the emerging industrial-military complex of war-torn Europe, the counterforce plans to save Slothrop. Slothrop, however, gradually goes insane until his sense of self becomes entirely fragmented.
The novel becomes increasingly disjointed and ambiguous as it draws to the end. Blicero puts his young lover Gottfried inside rocket 00000. Meanwhile, the 1940s plot is intercut with a contemporary scene from the novel's publication (1970s), as a rocket arches through the sky above a movie theater.
Gravity's Rainbow Literary Analysis
Most editions of Gravity's Rainbow clock in at over 700 pages, while the text itself is quite dense and full of intricate world-building and a sprawling character list. Because of its themes and structure, Gravity's Rainbow is considered a prime example of a postmodern novel.
The postmodernism movement began around 1945 and developed in response to modernism. While modernists believed new meaning could be found only by rejecting tradition, postmodernists gained inspiration by toying with past conventions and tropes. For this reason, postmodernists celebrated intertextuality by putting their own work in conversation with previous texts and with history.
Postmodernism is characterized by metafiction, historical and political references, intertextuality, unrealistic plots, and unreliable narration, all of which are included in Gravity's Rainbow. For example, Pynchon responds to the history of World War II and the very real arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States following the war. But he toys with history by creating a ridiculous plot line surrounding a soldier whose erections correspond to rocket attacks. The narration of the novel also becomes increasingly unreliable as Slothrop suffers a mental breakdown, and readers are left not knowing what is factual and what is the result of Slothrop's delusions.
Pynchon's work is often characterized as postmodernist, and postmodern characteristics are in many of his other novels, including The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and his debut novel, V. (1963). Other postmodern writers include John Ashbery, John Berryman, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, and Kazuo Ishiguro, among many others.
Gravity's Rainbow Themes
Gravity's Rainbow examines themes like technology, power, identity, and paranoia as Slothrop navigates a post-war world full of deadly rockets and dangerous conspiracies.
Technology and Power
Throughout the entire novel, different countries and groups of people vie for control over weapons of war, specifically the V-2 rockets. Weapons become highly sought after in the novel, as whoever has the best technology has the advantage over their enemies. Slothrop becomes PISCES's most crucial research subject after the organization decides he is the key to understanding and predicting V-2 strikes. Pointsman believes Slothrop can control this dangerous technology, which makes him both valuable as a source of power and a threat if the power is turned against the Americans.
V-2 rockets were the first long-range guided ballistic missile in the world. Nazis developed them during World War II specifically to destroy Allied cities after the Allied bombing of German cities. Over 3,000 of these missiles were produced from 1942-1945. The most-targeted cities include Antwerp, Belgium; London, England; Norwich, England; and Lille, France.
After World War II ended, the United States and USSR raced one another to gain control over the rockets and engineers. The V-2 rockets were later used to develop more advanced missiles and space launchers.
The intersection between technology and power is a recurring theme throughout the novel, as all different groups, from the Schwarzkommando to the Germans to the Americans, attempt to learn more about rockets and build their own. For Enzian, technology becomes the primary way to save and preserve the Hereros from outside threats, and he even considers sacrificing himself.
The novel ends with the image of Blicero's 00000 and a contemporary rocket launched into the air, reinforcing the idea that technology is the most important and dangerous source of power and conflict in the novel.
Identity and Paranoia
Throughout Gravity's Rainbow, Slothrop loses his sense of self as paranoia sinks in. He starts to question who he can trust and even who he is. Organizations like PISCES do not view Slothrop as an individual but as an object to be used against their enemies. After watching many of his acquaintances disappear, Slothrop realizes how little control he has over his own life.
Fig. 5: Slothrop's sense of self becomes fragmented as he slips into paranoia.
Slothrop flees his military responsibilities to pursue more knowledge about the rockets and his childhood. It isn't until PISCES starts pursuing him that Slothrop even learns about his experimentation as a child and how his identity is intricately connected to Laszlo Jamf. The further Slothrop delves into his identity and research, the more his paranoia grows. Slothrop eventually loses all sense of self and becomes a fragmented shell of his former self.
Gravity's Rainbow Meaning
Pynchon has never spoken to the meaning of the title Gravity's Rainbow, but some scholars have hypothesized that the title refers to the arc of V-2 rockets. These German-designed rockets were launched into the air and designed to fall back to earth and destroy Allied cities. The positive connotation of the word "rainbow" is set in stark opposition to the violent and dark subject matter of the novel. The narrator also implies that the "rainbow" is an orbit of violence and devastation that the characters are unable to escape:
But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice— guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape- latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children...." (Part Two)
Gravity's Rainbow is a satirical piece that uses dark humor and a comically unrealistic plot to criticize the widespread corruption of power after World War II. The novel's American, English, and German characters are gross stereotypes that care more about power than justice. Even after the war ends, authority figures only care about acquiring more weapons and outperforming their rivals.
Gravity's Rainbow - Key takeaways
- Gravity's Rainbow (1973) was written by American writer Thomas Pynchon.
- The novel is satirical and spans both science fiction and historical fiction.
- Gravity's Rainbow centers around the production and dispatch of V-2 rockets, specifically concerning American soldier Tyrone Slothrop, whose erections seem to predict where the rockets will strike.
- The main themes in the novel are technology, power, identity, and paranoia.
- Gravity's Rainbow critiques the widespread corruption of power after World War II and the obsessive race to acquire the best technology.
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