Gravity's Rainbow Analysis
Part 1: Beyond the Zero
Part 1 - Chapter 0: It Begins and Ends with Oil
"Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet" (166). And where do they meet? Well, that is what Gravity’s Rainbow is really all about — the how, why, and where they eternally come in contact; how the forces at play create a world built from these substances, their precursors, their derivatives; what we have done and are willing to do to con…
Part 1 - Chapter 1: Last Stop, The Wasteland
The screaming has always been here. Some years it is muted, in some it’s at our doorstep, and in most it has been in lands we’ve never heard of but whose fate is the product of our world’s greed, hidden away purposefully from our knowing; it is always tearing through space in one way or another. It is the scream of a terrorized people and whatever rocke…
Part 1 - Chapter 2.1: Banana Republic
Consumption is so engrained in our society that the vast majority of the population rarely gives a thought to where or how our goods are secured. The more necessary the components of life, the less one thinks on their creation or accumulation. For instance, the exploitation of populations around the globe is well known in regard to certain random unnece…
Part 1 - Chapter 2.2: Nixon as Lymphatic Tissue
Post-breakfast, Pirate learns that the rocket he saw did not, in fact, explode. Instead, it was simply a vessel which carried a message that he is to go and retrieve. The parallel here — rocket to mail distribution — is quite similar to a major theme in Pynchon’s
Part 1 - Chapter 3: Coffee, Paperclips, Heat Maps
Before he reaches his destination, Teddy Bloat, one last time, finds himself with the remnants of the glowing consumer lifestyle, now instead of shiny aisles filled with neatly stacked variations of produce or clean containers, it has become the filthy, cheaply made product, never lasting more than it was
Part 1 - Chapter 4.1: America, A Psychology
The pressure around us lowers for a moment; rain clouds roll in; reality shows its face. We are approaching the zero line. Tyrone Slothrop is America and his sins are about to be washed away. He may hold the entire burden of our own historical atrocities on his shoulders, but that doesn’t matter at the moment, for he is not only the men who enacted thes…
Part 1 - Chapter 4.2: A History of Englightenment
Slothrop was not one to give into the pure nihilism that we left him at last time. He has instead, although faltering for a bit, “become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name written on it" (25) and, along with that, the idea that he specifically is being targeted by Them. Who are these capitalized entities? Even though we know on a explicit …
Part 1 - Chapter 5: Unseen Tethers
A flickering flame takes count of life entering the building, lit in a room where the living and the dead interact, where loved ones come back for a few last moments of bliss. Soon it will go out. Thankfully, not for good just yet. Within the room, a multitude of people sit waiting or watching — every sect of life and profession: those in fancy clothing …
Part 1 - Chapter 6: Desensitization Toward Zero
In the complex modern world of the mid-20th-century (and its analog in Gravity’s Rainbow) where everything is driven by consumption and the desire for consumption, where we have characters representing entire nations, where conspiracies are run in a series of ever circling layers that are impossible to parse, it is often easy to forget about the little …
Part 1 - Chapter 7: The Old and the New
Today, Roger and Jessica are on their way to make a rendezvous with one Pointsman, a Pavlovian who performs certain experiments on dogs which he captures in war torn London — dogs who Pointsman names “Vladimir (or Ilya, Sergei, Nikolai, depending on the doctor’s whim)” (42). Despite it being World War II, the West was already finding its bearings in the…
Part 1 - Chapter 8: Beyond Response
With Roger and Jessica on their way home, we follow Pointsman into St. Veronica’s — the lights are dim, mutterings of pain and confusion lay humming in the halls, scavengers come out of the woodwork to feast on old stains. Through the obscured scene we see Kevin Spectro emerge, one of the keepers of The Book, watched by Pointsman himself, as he injects …
Part 1 - Chapter 9: Servants to the Margin
Roger and Jessica were last seen taking Pointsman to meet Spectro, driving off toward home. Now, we join them — Jessica mid-nightmare with the eyes of captured children watching over her, Roger still unphased by the horrors and sadness around him, their house empty to anyone but themselves, littered with daily refuse. Upon awaking for good Jessica notes…
Part 1 - Chapter 10: A Musical Revelation
Jazz holds unplayed notes, rhythms that move distinctly, and melodies that often feel incomplete because something is missing, though that something always returns in whatever form — whether it is later in the same piece, in another rendition by the same musician, or by a cover sometime down the road. Or often, these notes, or blank spaces between, hold…
Part 1 - Chapter 11: Hidden Messages
Laszlo Jamf, first mentioned in Chapter Eight as one who had Slothrop as a subject, is now shown to be a member, or at least in some way connected to, IG Farben, a company which utilized concentration camp slave labor to produce synthetics, rubbers, and plastics in WWII, and would go onto be the creator of Zyklon B, the poison used in Hitler’s gas chamb…
Part 1 - Chapter 12: The Death Drive
We have seen The White Visitation, but now we must learn of its implications — picture it covered in sheets of ice both thick and thin, pale blue highlights over the white façade. It is a cold palace emanating something evil. Twenty years ago, before being home to PISCES and all its workforce, it was a mental institution which, along with many others, h…
Part 1 - Chapter 13: Science, Magic, or Paranoia
Jamf and IG Farben have an inherent connection, both explicit and metaphorical: if you do not conform to their system, you are subject to their whatever punishment they can devise. As we have become so used to their presence, we no longer know they are even there, affecting us below the surface.
Part 1 - Chapter 14.1: Hansel and Gretel
The Present: Katje Katje’s freedom has never existed. There has been the illusion that she was, or is, free — that she can travel and leave whenever she desires — yet this mist will disperse over time. She has arrived here, at Pirate’s flat, from somewhere far away, now followed by an unseen camera held by an unnamed man, each step and gaze tracked as sh…
Part 1 - Chapter 14.2: Caged Animals
The Past: Gottfried and Katje Hansel has no desire to leave. Gretel cannot take him away. The Witch can proceed with her plan. Gottfried is young. Too young. So young that you see that blue of his skin still pulsing beneath. He sees her leave and can do nothing — wishes to do nothing but stay. His visions are warped by Blicero. Gottfried sees the same ima…
Part 1 - Chapter 15: Good Old British Cuisine
We saw Slothrop through the contents of his desk (Chapter 3), learned his family history in incredible depth (Chapter 4), saw him in a brief bout of drug induced hypnosis which led to his past in the Roseland Ballroom (Chapter 10), looked at Jamf’s experiments on him as well as how they’ve continued to haunt him (Chapter 13), and have heard many other c…
Part 1 - Chapter 16.1: Transactional Love
Roger and Jessica were last seeing holding each other after a rocket strike outside their flat, and now here they are — in their past, at least — in their first sexual encounter: “The very first touch” (120). There is self-conscious worrying, reassurances that mean nothing, and numerous orgasms “before cock was ever officially put inside cunt” (120), fo…
Part 1 - Chapter 16.2: Humanity's Lament
Christmas day. Roger and Jessica are together again. They observe an assortment of men and women enter a church and Jessica recalls that yes, in fact we did once have times like this. Though, times like this are long past — times where peace lay over their city like blankets of snow, where men and women gathered together en masse to hear a song, an even…
Part 1 - Chapter 17: Outside and Inside
Dreams map the future onto the present, or the past onto the present depending on which angle you look at it from. Things, as time goes on, become more abstract, more impossible to parse. Their sound waves grow and grow to the point that you notice no difference in their delta-T. They seem as they were before, almost blending into the accelerating world…
Part 1 - Chapter 18: Freaks in the Visitation
Carroll Eventyr was last seen in Chapter 5, acting as the medium for Roland Feldspath, a former engineer working under Captain Blicero. He finds himself a freak, having no idea why one day he stumbled upon the ability, unwillingly and through no fault of his own, to communicate with the dead — or, at least to transmit what the dead wanted to tell the li…
Part 1 - Chapter 19: Death to Death-Transfigured
We find ourselves back in the early 1930s when Peter Sachsa was still alive. It could be Eventyr’s unremembered discussion with Sachsa’s ghost, or the transcripts which were recorded of said conversations. But either way, back in time, Peter Sachsa’s lover, Leni Pökler, has left her husband, Franz. She has taken their daughter Ilse and now ponders on Fr…
Part 1 - Chapter 20: Not So Random After All
Like Pointsman’s erect penis, The White Visitation’s Christmas party is at full force. He is thinking deeply of the possibility that he will soon have complete control over Slothrop, possibly without the knowledge that he is under control. This idea of domination over an individual, the ability to glean every bit of information off of them to lead to an…
Part 1 - Chapter 21: Last Christmas
Our final scene of Part 1 shows Roger and Jessica at home with family — nieces, nephews, pets. They are sitting around a fire having recently opened Christmas presents shortly after returning home from a staging of Hansel and Gretel. The play they saw partially reenacts the story of Blicero, Gottfried, and Katje, with Hansel being a crossdresser kept in…
Part 2: Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering
Part 2 - Chapter 0: The Film Set in Motion
Note before starting: I decided to forgo the full write-up on Part 1 as a whole because I realized it would just be summarizing the stuff I had already written which is, for the purpose of what I’m trying to do with this Substack, pointless (in my opinion). A good summary can be found elsewhere (I recommend this
Part 2 - Chapter 1: The Birth of Venus
Along the beach is a casino named after famed Nazi war criminal, Hermann Goering — a place of chance where the house always wins and where, apparently, genocidal maniacs can rake in those profits. Or at least be held in high regard. This is where Tyrone Slothrop (along with Tantivy Mucker-Maffick — his deskmate at ACHTUNG — and Teddy Bloat — the known Wh…
Part 2 - Chapter 2: Ivy League Intelligentsia
Shortly after Slothrop threw the crab out to sea, Grigori the octopus followed it, consumed it, and, likely as he was conditioned to do, returned to his handler, Dr. Porkyevitch, a man who only had any place in this whole conspiracy because of support from Pointsman. But Porkyevitch himself was once caught up in the Bukharin conspiracy: a communist move…
Part 2 - Chapter 3.1: Proxy War Games
“‘Oh, […] Slothrop, you pig’” (206) are Katje’s first words to him as they wake. With that one off line, Katje predicts Slothrop’s inevitable descent from the average American to the (MINOR SPOILER ALERT) post-War bourgeoisie — the upper class man prone to the world’s innumerable immoral fetishes and products that will soon become an arm’s length away f…
Part 2 - Chapter 3.2: Hilbert Spaces
Slothrop and Stephen Dodson-Truck are still on the beach as the sun is setting. The latter, now drunk from their game of Prince, begins to confess certain things about who he is and why he is here. He begins with his marriage to Nora Dodson-Truck, member of the Psi-Section at The White Visitation, lover of Carroll Eventyr. She has left him in nearly eve…
Part 2 - Chapter 4: Infernal Repentance
Pointsman muses on how responses to our conditions and the stimuli around us change as we age. He is in The White Visitation, at a meeting between members of the Slothrop group discussing Brigadier Pudding’s general absence recently. Back in Part 1: Chapter 12, Pudding was known to perform his daily briefings — a series of seemingly unrelated, unimporta…
Part 2 - Chapter 5: The Evolution of Control
We linger behind at The White Visitation for a bit, seeing the winter’s shedding lay over the seacoast, the sweater laden office girls, visitors — all this beauty and normalcy hiding the Visitation’s purpose: to continue the oil and the fuel pumping onward through intricate pipelines, to maintain the weavings and secrets of the plots being kept in dark…
Part 2 - Chapter 6: Commodifying Culture
At parties of the Ivy League type, the punch will typically be spiked with a little booze. Given we are looking at the American 60s through the lens of the 40s, what better way to start than by spiking the hollandaise with some hashish instead. Among the affected are Hilary Bounce and Michele (the girl who Slothrop set him up with), and he watches as sh…
Part 2 - Chapter 7.1: Murders and Acquisitions
Before Slothrop attended Perlimpinpin’s party (Part 2, Chapter 6), he stopped at Hilary Bounce’s teletype (2.5) to send for some information on the SG-1 Document and Imipolex G. He did receive the document before the party, but it isn’t until now, afterward, that he opened it up. It turns out that Imipolex G is “a new plastic, an aromatic heterocyclic p…
Part 2 - Chapter 7.2: Hopeful Horizons
After leaving Nice, Slothrop arrives in Zürich, Switzerland as per the instructions of Blodgett Waxwing. He gets there via train where, through his dreams and daydreams, he observes the landscape changing around him. When at one time there were the foggy alps, cows and cowbells, fragrant scents of rain and grass on hillsides, there are now “army convoys…
Part 2 - Chapter 8: Dissolving in Sand and Shore
The war had been settling for a while, allowing the last remnants of power to redistribute their way across the world before the higher ups shut the main attraction down. Now though, the war in Europe has ended for good. Pointsman sits by the sea, feeling the need to relax, worrying about another general crisis at hand. Slothrop seems to have gone missi…
Part 3: In the Zone
Part 3 - Chapter 0: A Canvas for a New World
Part 3: In the Zone In William S. Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch, he introduces the Interzone, a tract of country free from law, where the differentiation between the living and the dead become blurred. This Zone is where Slothrop will enter and spend his time in throughout the course of Part 3. The parallels in the title are apparent both in that
Part 3 - Chapter 1: Seekers of the Grail
The Ice Saints have blown their frozen breath across Germany. While they were once “saintly or even Christian,” now “they are short on charity” (281). It is mid-May, a week or so after V-E day, and the land, along with its gods and magics, is changing. Some is growing better with the vegetation beginning to return and the tanks no longer ravaging the hillsides. But with this fantasy of peace arising, the Ice Saints are as well, and all that which they touch is being repurposed. Germany is the canvas for the world — one on which humanity’s raison d’être can be rewritten.
Part 3 - Chapter 2.1: The Halls of Death
Shoeless Slothrop is given, by Geli, a pair of Tchitcherine’s shoes, binding the two men further, as he makes his way toward the Mittelwerke. He is not the only one heading there. SPOG (Special Projectiles Operations Group) — Dennis Joint’s "adjunct of the British rocket-scavenging effort" (272) (2.8) — and American Army Ordinance people — the group working under
Part 3 - Chapter 2.2: Nazis in the Woodwork
The ghosts and the living continue to traverse the Mittelwerke, "moving, hammering, and shouting among the tunnels" (304). Slothrop, as Scuffling, walks the halls himself, making his way into a vision of Rocket Girls dressing him with metallic parts and proceeding with an orgy, down into Stollen 20
Part 3 - Chapter 3: The Deathward March
The rocket has achieved Godhood to many. Data and quality research may provide us with numbers — as Steve Edelman, who will briefly reappear near the end of the novel, catalogs — but it is the rocket’s holy essence which will give us a more accurate account of what it needs. The rocket has a spirit of sorts, speaking above the scientific world from a realm we cannot see.
Part 3 - Chapter 4: Shadows From Above
About a month after the events of Walpurgisnacht, Slothrop — recently returned from his adventures in the Mittelwerke, and as we soon learn, having snuck out of the castle inhabited by Glimpf and Nazi scientist Zwitter (3.2) — and Geli Tripping stand atop The Brocken, the highest mountain in North Germany.
Part 3 - Chapter 5.1: A Game of Chess
Tchitcherine in the Zone The Zone, despite being a state wiped blank, now being rewritten, has remnants that can never be fully removed. Like the minefields that line cow pastures, other rubbish, tangible or ideological, lies about as well. It has become a part of this zone, providing the canvas with a texture that each new feature, each person or animal that comes in contact with it, will have to react to in some way.
Part 3 - Chapter 5.2: The Synthesis Commitees
Tchitcherine (Still) in Kyrgyzstan Tchitcherine saw a number of opiate derivative variations in Wimpe’s collection. Two specific ones, Oneirine and Methoneirine, were even reported by Laszlo Jamf, the man who conducted his experiments on young Tyrone Slothrop. These two drugs were explorations into the possibilities that may lay dormant in the common morphine molecule, itself an opiate variation.
Part 3 - Chapter 6: A Hero or a Weapon
Slothrop, now a few weeks in Berlin post-hot-air-balloon-fight, has gotten sick from drinking the water before boiling it first. Typical American that he is, he immediately thinks he knows best and contemplates warning the Berliners of the poisonous nature of the tulip bulb which they mix into their boiled water.
Part 3 - Chapter 7: The Illusion of Will
Well, it’s time for Slothrop to go fetch that hashish, though he’s beginning to have a some second thoughts. He awakes from their night of sex, and, nearly immediately, Säure gives him the physical address of the hashish that he will be recovering from Neubabelsberg — the same address at which, recently during the Potsdamn Conference, it was decided that Germany would be occupied by foreign forces, specifically, Americans, British, Soviets, and French (many of whom we have already seen making the start of their occupation by searching for the Schwarzgerät and other German military/rocket hardware/intelligence).
Part 3 - Chapter 8: Cowboys and Aliens
As a short recap: back in Zürich, Slothrop had met with Squalidozzi, an Argentinian recently come to Europe from his home country, fleeing Perón and the rise of fascism within, with a group of like minded Anarchists. Squalidozzi, in a cafe, had talked with Slothrop, telling him of their arrival on a U-boat and how their goal, here, was to achieve the goals they had failed at achieving in their own land.
Part 3 - Chapter 9: Three Brothers
Tchitcherine drugged and captured Slothrop (3.7) and is now here, smoking some of the hashish he stole from him with Dzǎbajev, “a teenage Kazakh dope fiend […] who combs his hair like the American crooner Frank Sinatra,” (390) and who also happens to be Tchitcherine’s new sidekick. While Dzǎqyp Qulan was his sidekick in the Kirghiz regions during the distribution of the New Turkic Alphabet, Dzǎbajev is the sidekick here in the Zone.
Part 3 - Chapter 10: The Pain of Returning Home
Slothrop has awakened from his Sodium Amytal stupor — the second one since we’ve met him. Back in England, he was put under by his initial pursuers, those at The White Visitation, and he experienced his hallucination in the Roseland Ballroom and the trip down the toilet to fetch his harmonica.
Part 3 - Chapter 11.1: Grandeur through Extermination
Recap of Pökler’s Story So Far: Franz Pökler was first seen (1.18-1.19) as Leni Pökler’s husband and father of Ilse. We did learn a brief few hints of Franz’s past long, long ago — namely, he was a one time student of Laszlo Jamf before falling on hard times post WWI, and he had a childhood that haunted his thoughts.
Part 3 - Chapter 11.2: Switching Tracks
Franz Pökler’s Ilse has returned — not to the Wheel which he waits under in the present, but at Peenemünde where he and many others are engineering the V-2. He stepped into his cubicle after another day of questioning his purpose on this job, and what better symbol to restore his hope in the project than the symbol of all that he loved, missed, and fought for.
Part 3 - Chapter 11.3: Decomposition
“In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable.” (419) The corporate destruction and reconstruction of innocence has allowed it to be used for a purpose beyond innocence itself. As we watched Slothrop first enter the Zone, he saw many toys that had lost the air of innocence (3.1).
Part 3 - Chapter 12: Death by Water
Now back to Slothrop and Greta Erdmann. Slothrop had recently woken from his sodium amytal stupor, finding himself in an abandoned movie studio where he met Erdmann, a former movie actress who often worked for von Göll and who was now in search of her daughter, Bianca (3.10).
Part 3 - Chapter 13: The Blind Divisions
Within the head of one Horst Achtfaden emerges the Rücksichtslos (the Reckless), a sea vessel known colloquially as the Toiletship. It is a vision that arises from a similar source as Slothrop’s initial sodium amytal trip down his own toilet, though this time it is the Zone Herero, the ones run by Enzian, doing the interrogating.
Part 3 - Chapter 14: Modern Gods of the Dead
Slothrop and Erdmann have left the shelter they found in the Zone and have begun making their way to Swinemünde — the location where Geli told Slothrop that he could meet a man who would sell him the Schwarzgerät (3.1), the fact of which was reinforced when Säure mentioned der Springer being able to sell it to him (3.12).
Part 3 - Chapter 15: Somebody Has to Tell You
Lewis Carroll, famous for his two Alice in Wonderland novels, was a passionate storyteller. However, his penchant for writing children’s stories coincided with that of his desire for the social company of girls under the age of twelve. He even expressed, in writing, how he found them utterly ‘beautiful.’
Part 3 - Chapter 16: A Global Nakba
Slothrop ascends the ladder having just left Bianca behind, realizing the atrocity that he has committed, seeing both his and her life combine in a vision to show the exploitation of the innocent and the sundial-like circularity of its recurrence. But upon ascending, he sees Ensign Morituri, the Japanese passenger who had watched the orgy occur (though …
Part 3 - Chapter 17: Silhouettes and Silent Cities
Greta begins her story, just as Morituri began his. Slothrop has come to her to appease her fear, telling her that Bianca is not dead, like she believes — that she is simply in hiding and that Slothrop has not laid a finger on her. So, as he is finally allowed into Erdmann’s room, he is also allowed to learn more about her past.
Part 3 - Chapter 18: You Shouldn't Be Here
Slothrop has been aboard the Anubis — the vessel of the Elites — and has heard the stories of numerous of its riders: two separate pasts of Greta Erdmann, some of Ensign Morituri’s life and work, Bianca’s wants and dreams, and tidbits of various non-riders within these stories. Now, the stories done, the ...
Part 3 - Chapter 19: Black Markets of Above and Below
Slothrop, recently thrown off the Anubis during the storm, is saved by a child named Otto and his mother, the captain of this vessel, Frau Gnahb, two individuals participating in the black market within the post-WWII German Zone. The black market, though it has its many evil doers, sometimes also serves a purpose for the Preterite.
Part 3 - Chapter 20: Death for Death
The group walks through Peenemünde on their mission to rescue the von Göll. They walk into a storage shed where they pass “a single bulb [that] burns over the entrance” (506). Lone, burning bulbs have been seen a number of times throughout this story so far, the one that should be most easily called to mind being the bulb over Franz Pökler’s cot in the Mittelwerke which told him stories in his dreams.
Part 3 - Chapter 21: Power Sources and Distribution Networks
Enzian, Andreas, and Christian, last seen interrogating Horst Achtfaden in regard to the Schwarzgerät (3.13), are now travelling through Hamburg. They been searching hopelessly for the Empty Ones — the Otukungurua — and their most recent exploits. Recall that the Empty Ones/Otukungurua were the subgroup of Zone Herero who were with the rest of them in the Nordhausen mountains.
Part 3 - Chapter 22: Divine Retribution
After their narrow escape on Frau Gnahb’s boat and the loss of Närrisch at Peenemünde, Slothrop and the rest of the party arrive back at Swinemünde, where Slothrop’s first post-Anubis landing was and where he had first met von Göll. Now here, Slothrop seems to have had enough with this entire journey of his. His realizations upon the
Part 3 - Chapter 23: The People Assemble
We abandon Slothrop for a moment at the climax of his story. We have seen his ‘introduction’ as he worked for ACHTUNG and kept his map of women (1.3). His ‘rising action’ was extensive, covering him being interrogated and wandering in London through the entirety of Part 1, at the Hotel Hermann Goering and in
Part 3 - Chapter 24.1: A Vision of Freedom
The Gospel of Thomas is an apocryphal account of the childhood of Jesus, covering numerous miracles from the restoration of a man’s life to the bringing of another man’s death. However, the claim that begins this chapter, “Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in Hell today,” (537) does not literally appear within the apocryphal work.
Part 3 - Chapter 24.2: Second Thoughts and Final Decisions
Still in his dream, slowly being convinced that he must help form this apparent revolutionary counterforce, Pirate recalls a film with an “approximately human, terribly pale, writhing [figure] behind the crumbled remains of plate glass” (542). It is a one-time soldier who worked for an espionage unit.
Part 3 - Chapter 25: Deceleration
Slothrop’s world is slowing. Events are shifting into a muddier pace; he falls asleep and wakes in dim light, dreaming of regrets or could-have-beens. There is no longer the sense of urgency for finding a solution, only the desire to escape and the desire to start over.
Part 3 - Chapter 26: America, Meet Your Future
As Slothrop, Ludwig, and the girl with the furs come upon Major Duane Marvy, Slothrop fears that he has been caught. He had last seen the Major during the hot air balloon pie fight (3.4) after which Slothrop either presumed him dead or presumed that he was never to be seen again.
Part 3 - Chapter 27: Deadly Revelations
Some time ago (back in 3.13, right around the time when Slothrop was first meeting Erdmann and boarding the Anubis), Enzian and the Schwarzkommando, in a wind-tunnel testing chamber at Peenemünde, interrogated Horst Achtfaden for any knowledge he may have had regarding the Schwarzgerät and the 00000 Rocket. They drugged him to the point that he envisioned himself upon the . . .
Part 3 - Chapter 28: Saviors, Survivors, and Sinners
About 40 miles (65 kilometers) South-West from when we last saw him in Rostock, Slothrop now moves through the streets of “a coastal town, near Wismar” (567). This places him about half-way to his destination from when he first began travelling alone, being let off of Frau Gnahb’s vessel in Stralsund.
Part 3 - Chapter 29: Inhabiting the Inorganic
Back in 1.19, when Franz Pökler found Kurt Mondaugen at a rocket testing site, we learned that Pökler was a one time student of Laszlo Jamf. Now with Slothrop knowing Pökler’s connection with Jamf and Imipolex G, the 00000, and the Schwarzgerät, he is finally able to hear a first person account of at least . . .
Part 3 - Chapter 30: The Origins of Modern Power
Lyle Bland was Slothrop’s uncle on his father’s (Broderick Slothrop’s) side. We’ve briefly heard about him in the context of Jamf’s experiments with young Tyrone Slothrop. Lyle facilitated the deal between Broderick and Laszlo Jamf, ensuring that Jamf’s experiments on Tyrone Slothrop could be conducted.
Part 3 - Chapter 31.1: All-American Archetypes
It is August 5, 1945. The day before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Doctors Muffage and Spontoon — two British medical officers (M.O.s) who have been selected by Pointsman to track down Slothrop and perform a currently unstated operation on him — are walking through Cuxhaven (the destination which Slothrop has been traveling to for some time now and which he has finally reached).
Part 3 - Chapter 31.2: Untangling Webs, Severing Cords
In May of 1945, Cuxhaven was captured from Germany by the Allies. So, for a few months, as we saw in the previous chapter, various groups of people had been coinciding and grouping up in this city for a bacchanalian party. In early 3.31, we had dancing, singing, and drinking at the alcohol dump, gambling on fights at the docks, drug dealing and drug use galore.
Part 3 - Chapter 32: Last Days in Wonderland
Tchitcherine has arrived at the Luneberg Heath, which, as we have learned, is the location which Blicero (Lieutenant Weissmann) had originally launched the 00000 rocket from. He has traced Blicero’s path across the Zone in the same way he traced the location of the Kirghiz Light more than a decade past. And when here, now viewing the Heath from above, just as he had seen the ‘ajtys’ in their singing duel in a Kyrgyzstani village (3.5), he now “sees two men, one white, one black, holding guitars” (610).
Part 4: The Coutnerforce
Part 4 - Chapter 0: The Birth of the New World
Mentions and foreshadowing of this supposed Counterforce have been unraveling for some time now. As far back as Part 1, Chapter 1, we could see people like Pirate Prentice questioning the authenticity and nature of ‘Their’ project. But once the White Visitation was fully dismantled, allowing certain questioning members of the intelligence forces within it to reassess what they had been assisting in creating, this process began to accelerate.
Part 4 - Chapter 1: The Sign of the Cross
The bomb has finally dropped; it is shortly past August 6th, 1945, the day America destroyed Hiroshima. Slothrop dreams of a dramatic actress, Bette Davis, and a comic one, Margaret Dumont, paired together in a movie, listening to the kazoo of one of the Marx Brothers. His dream world, representing his subconscious, has now become something similar to what Pynchon has been doing — a blending of the satiric with the realistic, all which call to mind that which is occurring in the real and conscious world.
Part 4 - Chapter 2: Love and Hate in the Time of Gladio
Roger Mexico was last seen on the sea with Pointsman, Jessica, and Katje. It was on this beach where Pointsman officially began to break down due to the loss of Slothrop and the subsequent shutting down of the White Visitation. Since it’s been so long, here’s a quick recap on Roger and Jessica. Roger Mexico was the statistician working for the White Visitation who began seeing patterns in the locations where the V-2 rockets were landing in London — the Poisson distributions which also predicted Slothrop’s sexual encounters.
Part 4 - Chapter 3: Planned Obsolescence
Lycanthropophobia has worked its way into the psyche of the people. While some of the Nazis readily gave up, many went into hiding. Others, known as Werewolves, refused to give up the fight and continued terrorizing the German people. Even some who went back into hiding, like Blicero who “had grown on, into another animal . . . a werewolf . . . but with no humanity left in its eyes” (3.17, pg. 486), possessed this lycanthropic connotation.
Part 4 - Chapter 4: Holding on to Paradise
Katje now rides on into the Zone, “and she’s not of our moment, our time, at all” (656). Instead, she and the events of the novel move further and further away from any commentary of WWII-proper or its immediate fallout. She is now a member of the revolution — a hopeful revolution of and for the future. Her first step is to meet up with that other group who had been trying to bring down the system far before our Counterforce had — the Zone Herero, a complete representation of the most oppressed of groups.
Part 4 - Chapter 5: Cause and Effect
“You will want cause and effect. All right,” (663) is the line which Miklos Thanatz speaks to the Schwarzkommando in response to their questioning him about Blicero and the 00000 Rocket. It is also Pynchon’s response to the reader asking for at least some clarification on what all of this means. But to backtrack, how did Thanatz even get into the Schwarzkommando’s hands (and, since it’s been a minute, who is he again)?
Part 4 - Chapter 6.1: Fragments of Our Future, Part 1
We are now within the country.1 Not the country-side; not within borders; not denominationally via some citizenship or card. We are within. Or, in other words, we are seeing Slothrop’s now fragmented mind becoming a part of the country: “Unexpectedly, this country is pleasant, yes, once inside it” (674). Slothrop has fragmented entirely upon his crossroads (4.1) which officially led to the end of the ‘blank canvas’ that came out of the war. Now, that canvas is being painted upon.
Part 4 - Chapter 6.2: Fragments of Our Future, Part 2
Continuing on with the fragments of consciousness, Slothrop is here having an argument with Säure Bummer just as Gustav and Säure argued about Beethoven and Rossini (3.12), marijuana strains (also 3.12), and chess (4.1). This argument is a bit different, and touches on the meaning and mystery behind American idioms — namely, ‘ass backwards,’ which Säure argues should be ‘ass forwards.’ While he asks Slothrop why this may be, he does also realize — saying, " I wish somebody could clear up for me.
Part 4 - Chapter 6.3: Fragments of Our Future, Part 3
Slothrop walks through the streets of a dead world. "It could have been the Semlower Strasse, in Stralsund" (692): the town where Frau Gnahb dropped him off after raiding the Anubis. Or, could it have been Greifswald, where Pökler "spent the spring and summer converting a little island, the Greifswalder Oie, into a testing station" (3.11, pg. 404)? Or wait, maybe "it could be the Slüterstrasse in the old part of Rostock," (692) the town where Slothrop’s fragmentation really started to get going
Part 4 - Chapter 7: Seeking Heaven
Vaslav Tchitcherine, last seen looking out over the Argentinian Anarchists at the Lüneburg Heath (3.32), has been forced to abandon this post due to his being tailed by “Nikolai Ripov of the Commissariat for Intelligence Activities” (700) — yet another CIA analog, following the Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes (4.1) and the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies (4.3). This one seems to be a bit more straightforward, being a one for one representation of the CIA rather than the more obscured symbolic forms.
Part 4 - Chapter 8: Alliterative Anarchy
The Resolution of the Gross Suckling Conference, according to our epigraph, is that a nation should exist for the people within it, not for the institutions and corporations it raises up. This conference occurs in a pub in Cuxhaven, attended by Ensign Morituri, Carroll Eventyr, Thomas Gwenhidwy, and Roger Mexico, four members of the Counterforce.
Part 4 - Chapter 9: The Dark Side of the Moon
Geli Tripping has not been seen for a while. We first met her when Slothrop initially arrived in the Zone (3.1) after leaving Zürich (2.7). After he disembarked the train on which he first met Major Marvy and Enzian, he met Geli Tripping in Nordhausen, entranced by her singing out of a window.
Part 4 - Chapter 10: Slouching Toward Lüneberg
Enzian and the Schwarkommando have completed their project. By scavenging the Zone for parts, similar to what TsAGI and other Allied industries were doing, they have crafted their very own V-2 Rocket: “It is the 00001, the second in its series” (724). The major difference between the Zone Herero and the intelligence networks gathering these parts is that the international networks were doing so in order to develop weapons for their own desire to wage war, whereas the Zone Herero were doing so as both as a form of revenge and of protection.
Part 4 - Chapter 11: To Be Passed Over
Our society has now engineered what we perceive as the natural terrain. It has not used the natural world in the manner it was gifted for but has both destroyed it explicitly and synthesized compounds that would never decompose back into the Earth, and the “Trees creak in sorrow” (733) for this loss. Different passersby of a culvert — a tunnel — left writings and conversations upon them. On the arch — the parabola — the first message was a call to death, known here as ‘Stretchfoot.’
Part 4 - Chapter 12: Everybody and Everything
We end where we began: in a dream of the world’s end. The derelicts were herded onto railcars, driven through old crumbling city districts as the Elite made flight to safety, away from a coming Ground Zero. They were shuffled into hotel rooms standing shoulder to shoulder with people they had never seen before and were left alone to stare out the window at the dying world just before its end (1.1).
Wrap-Up
Wrap Up: Enter Stage Right, World War III
Whatever happened to the thing that set Slothrop’s quest off in the first place? Everything began because of his questioning why bombs were dropping wherever he had sex or even just had an erection. He learned that this occurred due to some Pavlovian conditioning by Laszlo Jamf when he (Slothrop) was a child, but this thread seems to be largely abandoned once he goes off to the Casino Hermann Goering and especially once he makes it to Germany. But why is such an interesting thread left unexplained?