I just don't understand. How the fuck Bianca and Gottfried the same person? And despite that...

I just don't understand. How the fuck Bianca and Gottfried the same person? And despite that, how does a sex slave fall in love with his master (Blicero)? I know this is avant-garde, but what the fuck.

Also, why is everybody gay in this book?

>I know this is avant-garde, but what the fuck.
kek
maybe avant-garde is not for you

>how does a sex slave fall in love with his master (Blicero)?
these are not people, these are characters constructed for the purpose of presenting ideas. slave/master is just a power dynamic

Bianca and Gottfried...
Same person...
Do you mean similar characteristics or the same character? If the latter I am confused

>how does a sex slave fall in love with his master (Blicero)?
The same way every female character including Bianca is so immensely DTF

Thanatz literally says Bianca and Gottfried are the same person.

Being too dumb/lazy, I'll ask you to cater to my needs. What should Slothrop represent? America "created" by Europe, then to be used for the war or what the war is catalyst for (Slothrop's Pavlovian conditioning, connection with the Rocket)?

He says "they are the same", not "they are the same person"

>Thanatz literally says Bianca and Gottfried are the same person.
page ref? too hard to remember everything off the top of my head

>How the fuck are Bianca and Gottfried the same person?
They aren't.

Okay, I believe you. But in what way?

Haven't read it in a while, but here's one surface level explanation.
Gottfried is the center of Blicero's sort of cult, as a symbol and a subservient individual with an illusion of importance (being in the rocket makes Gottfried believe he is more than a sacrificial emblem).
Bianca is a symbol and figurehead of the sex ship and their ideals. She is made to believe she has some sort of importance (I recall her saying something or doing something before a crowd of people on the ship) but isn't important in a physical sense, but in a symbolic sense.
Also, they are children.

She did Shirley Temple impressions and got spanked and dommed by almost every dood on board

What happened to Bianca? It's been a while since I read Gravity's Rainbow but I remember actually being repulsed by that scene in the book. Was she killed or suicide or something?

SUPER ANIMALS IN MY CRACK

I don't totally remember myself, I think she fell off the boat and drowned but I could be wrong.
She died for sure. And near the end of the book, Slothrop wishes (on his list of 10 or so wishes) for Bianca to be alright, even though he's pretty positive she's dead. I mean, he saw her fall off the boat and couldn't try to help her (if I'm remembering it right).
The book is written in such a hilarious way that it doesn't become as apparently soul crushing until discussing it.

My memory is likewise foggy, but I remember there being more ominous and depraved to Bianca's demise. Like the kid's end in Blood Meridian. Like she was raped to death or something.

That's what I was thinking

This is 100% possible and more likely... I read the majority of GR very stoned.
It would also go along with the parallels between Gottfriend and Bianca. Bianca was fucked to death while Gottfriend fucked to death (going along with the metaphor of the penetrative V2 rocker)

He finds her hanging in the engine room. Presumably killed by her mother at some point.

she hung herself in the engine room

why tf don't I remember this

Don't start thread with spoilers you mongrel

>Hurr

Faggot

when slothrop is with the pirate lady her son and the two germans they board the Anubis. they send him to get something out of the engine room and as he crawls through it he brushes against Biancas dead body.

Fuuuck I remember now. And it seems like it was written the way described. What a book

this also presumably caused the disintegration of slothhop . . . i don't think he had a coherent POV afterwards

>omniscient narrator
>POV

you know what i mean

Slothrop is a Modernist protagonist; useless and fallacious after the war, still present and yet fading away into irrelevancy

Slothrop is the 00000 rocket, his arc is parallel to the narrative arc of the book

Ah, so the ending makes sense now.

Shit, this might actually be legit. Can you elaborate a bit more?

I thought this was kinda obvious from the beginning tbqh, but it just never seemed significant enough to me.

Speaking of significance tho, I still don't understand why the rocket was fired in the first place. What end was it meant to have succeeded? To destroy a small number of people? To destroy the world?

did you miss blicero's conversation with Gottfried about his innocence? Imipolex G, the Scwarzgerat, all developed to allow a human to be placed inside the rocket. It was a ridiculous "symbolic" gesture. It was Blicero's way of preserving or saving Gottfried.

also you need to remember that throughout the novel the rocket is a sexual and spiritual object. Makes sense for a man to fire off his sex slave in it. And it's implied at the end that the head of the Schwarzkommando (Tchitcherine's hslf-brother whose name escapes me) is going to be fired off in the #00001

Enzian. So that means if he's fired off, he's fulfilling the Zone Herero's destiny, which is suicide, right?

Also, I like you, you actually are helping an user out rather than saying "If you don't know, I don't know what to tell you."

They're only the same in that they represent the same dynamic and assert the same idea: society's masochism. Also, the reoccurrence of youth dying or being gruesomely mistreated especially in a sexual manner shows cannibalistic component of the masochism.

Pynchons my fav writer for sure because my fav thing in books is goofs, gags, jokes and rambunctious behavior, and his books are full to the brim of it. Every novel is like one of those novelty snake cans, you open the book & POP you get a face fulla snakes and you fall back cackling. The mad mind, the crack genius, to do it! and then you think hmmm whats he gonna do next, this trickster, and you pick the book back up and BZZZZZZZZZZ you get a shock and Hahahahahah you've been pranked again by the old pynchmeister, that card. "Did that Pynch?" he says, laughing yukyukyukyuk. Watch him as he shoves a pair of plastic buck teeth right up into his mouth and displays em for you- left, right, center- "you like dese? Do i look handsome???" Pulls out a mirror. "Ah!" Hand to naughty mouth. And you're on your ass again laughing as he snaps his suspenders, exits stage right, and appears again hauling a huge golden gong.

So is that how Ilse and Bianca are the same? Other than being conceived because of the same movie.

Yeah

>how does a sex slave fall in love with his master
Ever heard of Stockholm syndrome?

>this might actually be legit.
He literally dissipates the moment the rocket is completed. He's rocketman for Pete's sake.

>Ever heard of Stockholm syndrome?
I thought of that originally, but literally everyone is like that in this book, save probably Bianca, whom I perceived to abhor both her parents.

People continuing to live with folks they hate isn't necessarily rare either. Human's are terribly masochistic.

To destroy the book's story

It's a surface-level plot element that Slothrop is connected to the 00000 in a metaphysical way, but that's different to saying that he IS the 00000. That needs to be explained.

>What end was it meant to have succeeded?
Sexual and "spiritual" pleasure, basically.

Is this book as disturbing as everyone says it is? It can't be that bad.

iirc the #00000 was fired well before Slothrop falls apart. Slothrop "disintegrates" around the time of the completion of the #00001, but i still don't think that makes >him< the rocket. it's just that his destiny and the rockets are linked. all the mysteries are solved, even if he hasnt solved them, he's lost and fragmented across the zone, just like the other scavenged A4s. Once the final rocket is completed his raison d'ĂȘtre more or less disappears, and so does his physical form. He is confused and lost even before his fracture. He's like a foil to the #00001. At the beginning of his journey the #00001 is in pieces scattered across the zone and he is whole. At the end the opposite is true. The books plays with opposites a lot. Tchitcherine and Enzian, light and dark, male and female, the spund and explosion of the A1 vs the A2, reverse pavlovian conditioning, etc.

again iirc Enzian had "given up" on the suicide thing, but I don't think the other Herero's had, hence the implication that he is going to be sacrificed in the #00001, and why the spy kid with the lemming lets the schwarzkommando plod along to Enzians eventual demise.

its really not. even the castration scene people complain about is really tame. the only really whack shit is the coprophilia

Dumb questions incoming, lads. But I'll be really grateful to whoever can help me out.

So, what exactly is Slothrop's motivation to investigate the weird sense of conspiracy around him? Both at first and later, because even after the war is over, he's still trudging around the Zone with some vague, ill-defined but still V2-related objectives. I get that he didn't have the discharge paperwork, so going right home probably wouldn't have been possible. But why not entirely forsake the V2 and focus all of his efforts on returning to the States, since, even in the novel, he thinks about how he wants to to home? What, in essence, drives him to the V2 over his other urges to get out of the mess he's in?

And, probably a bit less thematically significant, here, but: is there any hidden indication in the novel of what, exactly, causes Slothrop to have borderline sexual premonitions of where the rockets will fall? Obviously the conditioning played a part, but then Jamf is implied to be nonexistent, and obviously just getting an erection around the rockets wouldn't explain how he'd be drawn to seduce women at third party locations who happened to live where the rockets hit. That would be more like the erection BRINGING the rocket. Is that what Pynchon was going for?

He gets wrapped up in the mystery surrounding himself, Laszlo Jamf, Broderick Slothrop, Harvard, Lyle Bland, Imipolex G, his reaction to the rockets, Katje, Pisces, Royal Dutch Shell, etc. He's trying to figure out more about himself and his life. But he's constantly being caught up wacky escapades and getting distracted, to the point that he can no longer remember what it is he's doing. From the time he loses his identity papers at the Casino Hermann Goering his sense of self gradually starts slipping away. He's curious, afraid, confused, and losing touch with reality, and more importantly, himself.

>What, in essence, drives him to the V2 over his other urges to get out of the mess he's in?
He thinks the V2 (specifically the 00000) is the way out of the mess he's in. Once he loses his identity, he tries to recapture it by chasing after the rocket, which is hopelessly tied into the events of his own life.

>Jamf is implied to be nonexistent
by some nut writing in the newspaper 20 years later. I don't think that's conclusive evidence. Also what you're asking
>is there any hidden indication in the novel of what, exactly, causes Slothrop to have borderline sexual premonitions of where the rockets will fall?
that's precisely what Pointsman is trying to figure out. He never does, and that's why he attempts to have Slothrop castrated. He believes that it's some weird Freudian revenge against women, and that it does indeed draw the rocket.

>That would be more like the erection BRINGING the rocket. Is that what Pynchon was going for?
that's what I got out of it, anyways. The only real evidence that might contradict this is when the narrator explains how the rockets were controlled by Them and that they intentionally fell primarily upon the areas of town where the poor people lived.

i interpreted the erection/rocket connection as pure chance (like mexico suggested)

Who is "Them"?

You're absolutely delightful, user. Much appreciated.

I'd actually forgotten about Mexico's thoughts on that, and I'll have to pay extra close attention to this aspect on my next reread.

Thanks, both of you.

either the legit illuminati or a paranoid delusion

The White Visitation, I'm pretty sure. But who is the White Visitation?

So the bombs in London corresponded with Slothrop's sexual encounters, right? So why didn't anyway bombs fall when he went to France and fucked Katje, or the other bitches all across Europe.

I think the Zone Hereo's destiny is actually to get to the moon

irl the Germans were only shooting rockets at London. So the fact that they didn't fall in France or the rest of Europe would support the pure chance idea.

pretty sure the V2 batteries had been captured by that point. I don't think that a 1:1 correspondence of sex location to point of rocket impact was the point, just that the overlap seemed too big to be a fluke.

IIRC the "connection" between the rockets and Tyrone's conquests was based on a grid system, and there was no fixed time between the latter and the former. Someone in one of these threads posted the actual WW2 military map being used; basically, Tyrone ran around London getting his dick wet at random and the rockets fell at random. Tyrone banged so many bitches that practically any rocket impact would end up in the same grid square as one of them. That was Mexico's theory, anyway.

ish, Mexico does note that Slothrops map of conquests and the map of v2 landings correspond equally, what confuses him is that both obey a uniform dense poisson distribution, which means that it's virtually impossible to predict when the next rocket will fall based on the map. This plays into the deconstruction of causality the book seems so keen on developing (at least for the first part), the boom of the rocket comes after the exlosion, not before. Slothrop's conquests seem inexplicably linked to the rockets but it may be that being conditioned 'beyond the zero,'

That's something I never understood. The destruction/ reversal of causality. Like how Mexico and Jessica both orgasmed before penetration and this was somehow important to them both. What does it mean to invert causality?

It's a theme of order vs. chaos, which is one of the things that makes the book quintessentially postmodern. Cause and effect was considered an essential law of the universe in western civilisation all throughout history ... until the 20th century when quantum physics came along and things got super weird. Our picture of the universe changed, which just so happened to coincide with our ability to kill each other much more efficiently than ever before. (The V2 rocket not only defies cause and effect but crosses geographical barriers too: you fire it at an entirely different country from miles away.) Just like in literally every Pinecone novel, there are characters neurotically trying to impose order on a chaotic, orderless world. This in turn explains Pinecone's "lel random" style of plotting, or whatever you want to call. The plot is just a series of "an then this happens" - very thin connective logic between the events. So to keep us intrigued he assaults us with "mindless pleasures" (which was the original title of the book): sex scenes, chase scenes, comedy, sheer exuberance.

it's sort of an attack on the notion of a causal narrative in general. Instead of living in a world of consisting of events linked on a logical basis-- A implies B implies-- you have a much more complicated web of interactions and connections between events and their effects. The pavlovians running around with their dogs, the mystics, seers, and mediums, all serve to investigate the apparent deterioration the causal system, all centered around Slothrop and the V2 rocket. GR is also a circular book, the beginning of the book starts to make more sense the further into the text you get; this also relates to the

this, the rocket's eventual destiny is not to return at all

Oooooh, so the rocket isn't a bomb at all, it's a shuttle?

it's really open to interpretation, the 00000 rocket still has that apex moment (with that german word for it instead) right at the top of the parabola/rainbow, but Enzian's people's mythos has a whole story about deliverance to the moon and miscommunication with the gods, also one of the original V2 scientists (the one who fucks his daughter in german disneyland and knows montague) originally worked on rocket rockets without the context of missles and he becomes fixated on his daughters remark on how wonderful it would be to live on the moon, so there's definetely ingredients to suggest a sort of transcendence on part of the rocket

it's not a surface level plot element at all, it's the central metaphor to the story's protagonist. People assemble around slothrop much in the same way they do to the V2 rockets, both are "conditioned beyond the zero," having been prepared for their destiny's from the moment of conception, their movements across europe demonstrate the failure of society as a result of world war ii as well as the delocalization of responsibility/agency on the behalf of bureaucracies and militarial industrialization, Slothrop is also literally "rocketman" and his sexual adventures run akin to the much darker sexual past of the rocket, involving Katje, Blicero, and pretty much every other character. Both are also followed and sought after in a desperate yet hard-to-pin-down-exactly-why frenzy, there's something hopeful to both of them, but whatever true purpose or ray of redemption they have is swallowed in the endless minutiae of conspiracy and paranoia.

god i fucking love this book

>"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.
--Werner Von Braun

Whoever, chose to put these words at the beginning of the book is a hilarious sick fuck.

How does one compose literature in a post-Gravity's Rainbow world?

>live on the moon
Blicero also discussed this with Gottfried, so I made that connection with Ilse too.

Hey, by what I instantly read I can almost tell without a doubt that you are spoiling the plot of the book. If its indeed a spoiler why are you such a fucking retard as not to cover it or warn before posting?

Hold up, Pokler didn't actually fuck his daughter, right? I haven't finished GR but I've read past that part and from what I remember from that passage, I thought it was just Pokler going over a conspiracy in his head of what "They" had expected him to do.

It's a fantasy

terrible posts, cringe-worthy, sterile interpretations they shill in academia

Pokler was being paranoid and that wasn't his daughter.

Why? It's literally how rocket scientists thought. You mad?

Delillo has surpassed Pynchon at this point.

... And your perception on the destruction of causality within GR?

Von Braun was a Nazi that succeeded in building destructive devices that took the lives of millions of people. So it's with that in mind that I wrote my post on his optimistic spiritual musings.

The castration was harder to read than the shit-eating to me, personally

According to Wikipedia, the shit eating scene was the only thing that kept GR from winning the Pulitzer prize.

I take offense at this

>Just like in literally every Pinecone novel, there are characters neurotically trying to impose order on a chaotic, orderless world. This in turn explains Pinecone's "lel random" style of plotting, or whatever you want to call. The plot is just a series of "an then this happens" - very thin connective logic between the events. So to keep us intrigued he assaults us with "mindless pleasures" (which was the original title of the book): sex scenes, chase scenes, comedy, sheer exuberance.

I'm not quite sure that's it. You make him less surprising by doing so. What if there's more?

>Delillo has surpassed Pynchon at this point.

are you memeing? I haven't read anything by him

if not, what do you recommend

DeLillo is different from Pynchon. Pynchon writes dense complex plots with time and plane-of-existence hopping. He's also very funny.

DeLillo writes interesting plots, intertwining sometimes, but never to the point of Pynchon. He's also as funny as a sock

>He's also as funny as a sock

what did he mean by this?

Obviously one of those "squish 'em kindly" creeps. You don't get fish blood out good socks.

Wait, so is DeLillo funny or not?

Not him, but Delillo does not aim to be funny. He writes realistically. He deals with similar themes as Pynchon but doesn't use po-mo gimmicks.

Although both are very strong, Libra is better and more perfect than anything Pynchon's done.