Gravity's Rainbow - Part 1 - Chapter 21: Last Christmas
Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 1 - Chapter 21: Roger and Jessica on Christmas Day
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 a cage, Gretel waiting for her chance to save them both, and The Witch foaming at the mouth. But the chance never comes because another rocket drops a few blocks down the street, perhaps launched by Blicero himself. The scene playing in front of them stops, the fire of the oven burning on as the fire outside now rages, one being a symbol for the other. Gretel was about to knock The Witch right into the fire, but events such as this can stop our hero from saving the world in the blink of an eye, with no sound to accompany until all is engulfed.
So instead, Gretel sings, telling us of our withered dreams, the bankers and managers glutting on the world, and “of children who are learning to die” (175), because as the facade falls down exposing the story being told on stage as reality, we begin to see evil creep out of the woodwork, no matter how optimistic it may be to picture that smiling face looking down on us.
Christmas also seems to be the time where the dead return to us in memory, or perhaps, with the line becoming blurred, in reality as well. Though when they return from whatever predetermined death they were deemed to partake in, they bear ill-will — a curse even. Always there to haunt the world built to take them too early.
In the end though, all anybody really wants at Christmas — all anyone really wants at all now given the war going on — is love. Roger desires “to warm all of her, not just comic extremities” (176). He knows that this might be all he can offer in the moment, and because of that, he knows she is destined to leave. For warmth is not enough anymore, nor is the gentle touch of one who you love. Oddly though, the thought of saving their love releases him — albeit momentarily — from his excessive nihilism: the pattern of the rockets may not matter, nor would his own death, as long as he could have her. His mind tumbles back into the needs of a pre-war state — a simpler time. Unfortunately, he does not believe that Jessica’s will. She, once again, needs the security that Beaver/Jeremy can provide to her in times like these, even if that does mean subjecting herself to the ideas “that we are meant for work and government, for austerity,” that “these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day” (177), for there is no time for mindless love now. No matter if she herself will become another preconceived cog in the system — a domestic bureaucrat —at least she will be safe.
The final words of Part One end in what is perhaps one of the most beautiful passages in the English language — pure poetry expressing the powerful love that Roger feels for her:1
She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true.
[…]
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are “yours” and which are “mine.” It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible. . . .
(177)
He cannot lose her to the war; it is infecting her. Taking over every system and presenting itself symptomatically on the surface. The only way to save what they have, is to destroy War itself. But how could a single distraught man, himself alone, destroy what has been built up by powers we cannot even fathom? As of now, he cannot think of anything but her. Perhaps though, there is a way.
That concludes Part 1: Beyond the Zero! Thank you all for sticking around through the 29 posts that have covered the first 21 “chapters.” I’ve really had an excellent time writing these and they’re solidifying this novel as the best I’ve ever read (I mean, it always was, but this just further proves that point) as well as helping me understand it better itself.
Up Next: Part 2, Chapter 0: The Title and Epigraph of Part 2
Also, a little trivia about me, I pared down this section just a bit and used it at my wedding ceremony. By paring I mean basically how I quoted it above without the word “British.”
Indeed the best novel ever written