Gravity's Rainbow

“Once upon a time Slothrop cared. No kidding. He thinks he did, anyway.”

Slothrop cared once, but—like many characters—he has become so alienated from society that he has stopped feeling anything. In trying to describe this alienation, Slothrop cannot even remember whether he ever did care. The scattering and fragmentation of his sense of identity means he cannot even relate to his past self, becoming unable to remember whether there was even a time when he had any investment in society at all.

“But where is the war?”

World War II is a global trauma that traps the characters in a mire of pain and suffering. However, the novel takes place during the final days of the war when the result seems inevitable and the characters are inexorably moving toward the conclusion, playing their roles disinterestedly to the point where they can no longer even point out the location of the war. The war has become a state of mind more than an actual conflict. To the characters fighting the war, nothing seems real any longer, including the war itself.

“A stronger stimulus no longer gets a stronger response.”

For the people fighting World War II, the conflict itself is the strongest possible stimulus. The scale of death, destruction, and human misery is far beyond anything in human history. Yet, despite the scale of the conflict, the characters cannot bring themselves to care. They have become numb and indifferent to the world, to the point where even this strongest possible stimulus elicits no response.

“AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN.”

As the Nazis take over Germany, Germans seek what optimism they can. Nevertheless, optimism fades quickly, replaced by a numbness that manifests in strange, nonsensical slogans written on walls, which provide rallying cries for resistance. The novel’s prevalence of sadomasochistic sexual relationships conflates pain and sex in such a way that the army of lovers seems to be craving their own suffering. In a literal sense, they can be beaten, and they want to be beaten by their abusers so they can feel something—or anything—before they are inevitably crushed by the dominant forces of fascism.

“It’s the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that.”

Slothrop uses obscene gestures as a form of witchcraft. He lacks the knowledge of rituals used by witches like Geli, but he can profane in a similar manner. Showing his middle finger to others is a way to demonstrate a rejection of social norms and to demonstrate an unspoken condemnation of the opponent. Slothrop relies on these gestures because he lacks the profane vocabulary of other characters, though he is no less effective in conveying meaning.

“They’re so cruel. I don’t think they even know, really…. They aren’t even sadists…. There’s just no passion at all….”

Gravity’s Rainbow describes the cruelty of social numbness. Characters feel so alienated by society that they are hurt and they hurt others, they are surveilled and they survey others, all without any real purpose or engagement. There is “no passion at all” (162) in anything anyone does, to the point where people accept the banal sadism of existence because they cannot bring themselves to imagine anything else.

“By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy.”

Gravity’s Rainbow depicts a hollow society in which bureaucracies mask a deep, painful emptiness. The institutions and administrations that once supported and extended the society have become ossified, left in place while the “life force operating in Nature” (171) rots away. As a result, Pointsman and others recognize that the hollow bureaucracies are all that remain in a society that has nothing meaningful left to offer.

“It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient. Mixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses, it was the sovereign smell of their first meeting, and her emblem.”

Pudding subjects himself to the sadomasochistic dominatrix sessions arranged by Pointsman. The convergence of sex, profanity, pain, and transgression provides something like meaning in his life. Like many people, Pudding was traumatized by his experiences in World War I. Now, while fighting another war, he feels numbed by this trauma. Allowing Katje to defecate in his mouth reminds Pudding of the pain of the trenches in World War I. The sessions may not make Pudding feel good, but they make him feel something. He would rather be reminded of his trauma than feel nothing at all.

“It began as a search for some measurable basis for the common experience of being haunted by the dead.”

The description White Visitation research contains one of the novel’s key themes: The way in which trauma alienates and tortures people is recurrent, which explores how traumatized people seek out any way to reengage a society that seems distant and hollow to them. They want the “common experience,” but they are too haunted by the dead to derive anything substantive from existence. In the same way, the entire society depicted in Gravity’s Rainbow is haunted and searching to return to a common experience almost beyond memory.

“The doll’s hair was human. The smell of it burning is horrible.”

The use of human hair in the doll is an example of the real being made artificial. The doll is a human effigy, made to appear human but remaining essentially unreal. However, it contains an idea of humanity that is long lost. The hair once belonged to a real, living person, who has now become as artificial as the doll. By burning the doll, Slothrop is burning the conflation of the real and artificial, trying to separate the real from the unreal in a quest to figure out which parts are truly human. The burning smell reminds him that this search is painful.

“One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be the chance to ignore no-parking signs.”

After all the effort of two World Wars, transgressive acts that have decimated society and alienated its inhabitants, the only real victory is “the chance to ignore no-parking signs” (223). Ignoring a parking sign is a defiance of low-scale administration, a transgressive act that flouts the rule of authority in the most minor way possible. The “sweetest fruits of victory” (223) are irrelevant, minor rejections of a society that has been hollowed out and destroyed to the point where any real victory has become impossible.

“Are you really this evil, or is it just an act? Are you really trafficking in pain?”

Evil can be “just an act” (261), like every other abstract idea in the novel. Nothing is truly real as everyone is simply performing versions of themselves with no real substance or intent, playing the roles that society expects of them. However, the actual result of their actions is the same: Sincere evil produces the same results as performative evil. In a society that expects evil and pain, however, the search for sincerity is more meaningful. Sincere evil would, at the very least, be genuine.

“Invisible. It becomes easier to believe in the longer he can keep going.”

The true Slothrop has become lost, wandering aimlessly through the Zone, becoming more spread out and diffuse. By driving himself toward a nebulous and potentially meaningless goal, he convinces himself that his life has direction. The true Slothrop is invisible, but he can make himself believe that his life has direction simply by heading in one direction for long enough, turning momentum into meaning by sheer force of will.

“What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moire, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences.”

Slothrop becomes a Hegelian synthesis of competing paranoias. He begins the novel as a devoutly paranoid man, assuming that everyone is against him. As he learns more about the rockets and Laszlo Jamf, however, he begins to suspect that his involvement in Their schemes has gone on for far longer than he ever knew. His paranoia becomes justified and inverted, competing with itself until “the two patterns create a third” (296). There is no real Slothrop any longer, only the new character made of “competing shadows, interferences” (296). He becomes the synthesized product of refined paranoia.

“The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.”

Earlier in the novel, Slothrop raising his middle finger to the world was one of the few meaningful gestures he could perform. The deeper he ventures into the Zone, however, he begins to feel the profanity turned back against him. Now, fate and Providence are conspiring against him, locking him into their cruel and profane game. Slothrop has his own gesture thrown back at him like a self-inflicted pain.

“It was always easy for men to come and tell her who to be.”

Margherita’s acting career reflects the characters’ search for identity. As an actor, Margherita takes on many roles. She does not truly understand her true self, but she performs the identities that other people (typically men) project on to her. She is a blank slate, shaped by a patriarchal world that denies her the opportunity to explore her own identity. Her acting career is an exaggerated version of the way every character performs an identity to fulfill social expectations while struggling to understand themselves.

“Oh, a State begins to take form in the stateless German night, a State that spans oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the International or the Church of Rome, and the Rocket is its soul.”

The Zone contains within it a new kind of state. In the aftermath of World War II, traditional boundaries, restrictions, expectations, and ideals are damaged beyond repair. The state is an embodiment of these traditional ideas: A state is a clearly defined and bordered geographical region that polices moral and social codes. The new kind of state inside the Zone rejects these ideas; it rejects traditional ideology or religion, replacing everything with the expression of pure power that is the rocket. This new rocket state contains the rejection of everything that came before.

“There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati.”

The conspiracy theories in Gravity’s Rainbow function as narratives. They are stories the characters tell themselves and others, attempting to make sense of a seemingly nonsensical world. The conspiracy theories provide the semblance of structure and control, implying that someone, somewhere is at least in charge of something, rather than the directionless, amoral dirge the world resembles. The United States being a “gigantic Masonic plot” (442) may or may not be true in the context of the novel, but the result is the same: The characters remain alienated from society, whether they are comforted by the theory or not.

“There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made—at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.”

The counterforce is presented as the heroic team who will travel to the Zone to save Slothrop. As soon as they form, however, their legitimacy and their effectiveness are undermined. Instead of a functional team, they are an extension of the society itself. They have no real direction; they are a disparate group, all laden with their own trauma, trying to work toward an impossible goal that none of them truly understand. The counterforce is the perfect embodiment of the society, a dysfunctional collection of individuals masquerading as the united solution to the world’s problems.

“Scattered all over the Zone.”

Slothrop’s fate is to become spread out and diffuse. He has become the embodiment of the Zone, untethered and scattered just like the region’s morality and social bonds. He no longer has an identity, he barely even has a physical location, and he seems to have no more purpose or ambition. Instead, he drives forward because he cannot conceive of doing anything else. Slothrop is becoming one with the untethered new form of society that is emerging.

“The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death.”

The characters can no longer conceive of a life with any purpose beyond death. Dying—and doing so in an interesting fashion—is the only thing that can invest existence with any meaning. In a society where every action is meaningless or insincere, the only sincere gesture that a person can make is to die. In a society that cannot give people anything, the only thing that people can give is their life. Dying a weird death at least creates the opportunity for infamy.

“So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.”

The Zone becomes a spatial embodiment of the characters’ psychological alienation. The “useless, ugly, or shallow” (571) comforts are distractions, put in place by the “men whose only talent is for death” (571). The Zone, like the society, is ruled by people whose only knowledge of life is how to end it, meaning that the lives of the people in the Zone are hollow and unfulfilling, with death becoming the only meaningful gesture left available to them.

“The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for the Ufa film Die Frau im Mond.”

The countdown to the rocket launch is a key aspect of the popular conception of the rocket; when people imagine rockets, they imagine a countdown. However, the countdown is an artificial creation designed to raise tension. It is performative. Like life itself, society’s idea of the rocket is formed through deliberate emotional manipulation and is unwittingly artificial. The real and the unreal feed into one another, creating a synthetic entity that is mistaken for reality.