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Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow . The Ideas of the Opposite
Author(s) -
Paz Menahem
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2009.00953.x
Subject(s) - rainbow , subatomic particle , philosophy , literature , symbol (formal) , motif (music) , reflexive pronoun , theme (computing) , plot (graphics) , epistemology , theoretical physics , physics , art , aesthetics , quantum mechanics , mathematics , elementary particle , linguistics , computer science , statistics , operating system
Thomas Pynchon’s highly complex novel deals with the personal and social difficulty of accepting a new worldview. Set at the end of World War II and in its aftermath, the protagonists find themselves at the crossroads between Newtonian mechanics, epitomized by the V2 rockets, and the foreshadowed atom bomb, which is based on the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. The style of Gravity’s Rainbow resembles the scene of a subatomic world: it is presented as an ever‐changing kaleidoscope of characters, places, events and interactions, which are constantly redetermined in relation to each other in an unpredictable manner. Pynchon manages to create a unifying theme by making all the twists in the plot comprehensible as manifestations of the underlying attempt to reconstruct selfhood. In addition, he refers recurrently to the motif of light, both as a physical entity at the center of modern physics and as a literary symbol of classical stability. In the end, his main protagonist himself turns into a mysterious source of light.