OK, hopefully we can have a serious thread about this book without anyone sperging out about "muh meme books"
WTF was going on in the ending? Why is Gottfried in the rocket? Why did the whole narrative break down? What exactly happened with the testing on Slothrop when he was a child and what was up with his dick predicting rockets?
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I didn't understand it and required an user to explain, so as far as Slothrop's dick: as a baby he was experimented on to see if he could be conditioned to get an erection when in the presence of a specific plastic (later used in the missiles in WW2), then afterward the scientist tried to deconditioning but decreased it "beyond the zero" into the negatives, so he would get an erection BEFORE the plastic was present.
Did you get the deconditioning part? Maybe I'm retarded.
But yeah at the end it just stops talking about Slothrop.
I forget who Gottfried even is.
>and what was up with his dick predicting
come on there's a whole chapter about how that's not the case
(and that's besides the parts about imipolex conditioning as a baby and imipolex being in the rockets and the pavlovian beyond-the-zero ultra-paradoxical reflex)
not OP but he was Blicero's gimp
>come on there's a whole chapter about how that's not the case
But that's not entirely explicit. You're talking about the Poisson distribution, right? There's a reasonable ambiguity.
I think the final form of the swartchgarett (however it's spelled) is to go to the moon, you get hints of this in the section with that engineer with the incesty daughter as well as with the character who's also in V who worked on rockets before missiles
this also "breaks" the arc in a way, and you get traces of it in the mythology of the dying black dudes, about a message being lost, and in the rilke poetry about the moon as well as the occultism around it in the seance scene, it's about "breaking" causality sortof
was /ourguy/ taking shots at GR in his opus?
There's a lot going on but basically is right about Slothrop's dick, except I don't remember whether he was deconditioned or whether the stimulus-response time was intentionally decreased "beyond the zero". And as points out the whole dick->rocket thing may just be a case of pareidolia.
The narrative breaks down because, among other things, Slothrop loses his mind.
The real-world explicit end goal of the Aggregat (V2) program was to orbit a satellite, but the scientists involved wanted to go to the moon (among other things). The life-support system that enabled Gottfried to fly in the rocket was part of this. At the same time rocket tech makes mass slaughter easier (nuclear ICBMs). So manned space exploration and apocalyptic war are inextricably linked.
Fly me to the moon
A-And let me play among the stars
i find the whole moon thing kinda ridiculous, i think it's established that the arc can't be broken because the rocket is a symbol of death, something you can't escape
however, i read it a long time ago and i don't remember anything about flying to the moon
also, i just realized how "Borgesian" the whole beyond the zero penis conditioning is
Pokler's story...
and the conditioning thing is just satirizing Little Albert
was that the guy who met with his "daughter" once a year?
yeah
That explains all the Martin Fierro stuff then
>Anyway it will be nice to see a couple of young folks like that getting together, all right.
Slothrop's persona "disperses". He becomes indistinguishable from the "ambient person" in the zone. The narrative reflects this lack of distinct-ness
Gottfried=God Freed. Blicero put him into the rocket to realize a twisted fantasy. Also its not quite clear but at the end the last song is interrupted by a rocket hit and subsequent explosion. If IRC its insinuated that it is the 00000 and that its hitting is circa the 70s. (I'm a little foggy on these details)
And the other user is right about Slothrops conditioning "beyond the zero"
;_;
>graph paper
god what a hipster
>he was his best man
>three years later he was his pallbearer
where can I find more of this snapshots from his letters? I've seen one before of him talking about his craft, never realised there were others
anyone knows if he's writing something new ? hold old is he anyway now ? Bleeding Edge was a bit meh like Gibsons contemp triology
Hopefully we'll get one more doorstopper out of him at least
he's like 80 now, would suck if Bleeding Edge were his final release but it wouldn't surprise me
hopefully he's working on some final epic he's been on with since the 70s like AtD
I thought pareidolia strictly refers to facial recognition?
yeah GR2
there are more on google images but they're not as interesting as these
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sweet! I was looking for these.
>well, inquired Ferdinand Feghoot, have you taken Lief off your census?
Oh for fuck sake
>how not to lean on the crazy-assed surrealistic passage as a crutch when I'm too lazy to engage or keep the reader's attention
looks like Pynchon never managed to fix that problem
I mean, the crazy-assed surrealistic passsages succesfully hold my attention pretty well, so I don't really see it as a problem
I don't really see it that way and I'd argue most don't. His sentences are just tricky to follow and it's easy to lose focus/get lost. I don't really see it as a "normal sense vs. surreal episode."
There was no life support system in the schwarzgerat, just a compartment for Gottfried to ride (and die) in. Weissman/Blicero was using him as a human sacrifice in an occult ritual. The Counterforce segment goes back and forth in time without always being entirely clear about what's happening when or if it's happening at all, but I always saw the 00000 launch segment and V2 hitting the theater as happening before the beginning of the book in London, and the ritual succeeding insofar as serving as the catalyst for everything else that happened to Slothrop and everyone in The Zone.
I don't have my copy readily accessible but I distinctly remember a sentence or two that temporally placed the theater that gets hit at the end of The Counterforce as being in the 70s or 60s, which obviously means that it is chronologically the last thing that happens in the novel.
If someone could (diss/)prove this by providing a quote I'd be happy.
There was a segment involving LA in roughly the 60s or 70s or so interspersed between the launch and impact but it wasn't actually happening at the same time as the launch.
Yeah, set at the theater right?
My point being that clearly if the theater was still running in the 60s/70s, and it gets obliterated at the culmination of the novel, then the impact must happen in the 60s/70s. The reason why no one (i.e. Army, Schwarzcommando, etc.) could find the 00000 was because it was inexplicably in the air for 20 years.
He has a point tho
I don't think so dude, I remember reading that it's set back around the blitz at the beginning of the novel.
The LA passage is iirc entirely devoted to a highway segment
>rocket is a symbol of death
The rocket is explicitly an inorganic Ubermensch/God.
>only an idiot wouldn't be able to see the thematic cross-over there, especially given the fact that we're already dealing with metaphor
c'mon son
get in the god damn rocket gottfried
it actually makes me cringe that people try to understand this book without having some kinda spiritual perspective on it.
try to understand the story impulse/idea behind tarot cards or something.
this isnt some pulp shit, its an excercise like the rest of treh meme trilogy
>he believes in god
not what im saying.
The whole god thing is sort of irrelevent to the kinda spirituality im referring to.
literally the human spirit, i mean.
but what do i expect of Veeky Forums atheists? they're probably the main audience for this book
I'll check when I get home and report back
>they're probably the main audience for this book
its a nice way of saying pynhon fans tend to be fedora tippers.
this isn't a knock against pynchon per se, it's just a sad fact.
You're being disingenuous here.
I would think that anyone who understands a work of that caliber would be smart enough to be a little self conscious at least.
That said I do remember Mike saying a bunch of steampunk fags showed up to a showing of IV so I dunno lol
Am I?
>implying next to anyone on this board actually understands this book/heady-books-in-general
this guy gets it, it's part of the reason why pinecone is such a wizard and why part 4 is so insane
but most people just do not get GR and will never get Pynchon, even if they claim to like him
AtD is steampunk
ok
The tarot and kabbalistic connection is pretty blatantly spelled out, especially in part 4, but also before that at various points as early as Beyond the Zero.
what are your favorite GR scenes
mine is when Enzian and Tchitcherine meet
that definitely does not mean people understand it though.
It's a cute reference for most readers im sure
The central asia stuff
Slothrop finding Bianca's body hanging in the dark, fucking bleak
Also, the putrid english candy eating
Pokler's story
The hash run
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>he didn't see goldmemeber when he was 10 years old
i always felt that weisenberger was quite good but never great
Mine, too.
this
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>"Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don't leave me."
>They're in love. Fuck the war.
Patrician choice
I wouldn't say it's my favorite, but I never really appreciated that final Gottfried stream of consciousness sequence until I actually focused on how the words sounded in my head. I thought it was a really cool sequence how all the words managed to have this flow to them.
>nobody has posted Byron yet
Fucking conts
This passage is one of a few that I show to people who try to tell me he's too cold. When he wants to be human, he can, and he does it as well as anyone.
Guys, ive heard so much about this book before having read it that reading it for plot or meaning is pretty much pointless for me. Should i still try to read, knowing about its themes of paranoia, death, submission etc, and the ending, the circular structure, "it was all a movie", gottfried in the rocket, etc.?
Reading about it is no substitute for reading it
Didn't notice the Damn loading thing on the bottom, sorry fellas
Here you go user
Spoilers mean very little when it comes to GR, it's pretty much impossible to spoil the book. Also, no clue what you mean by 'it was all a movie', but that's wrong, lol
didnt some Veeky Forumstuber say the ending revealed it was all one big movie or some shit
well damn i guess im open to trying to read it again lol
Maybe he/she was referencing the theater at the end of the book. Don't know what they meant by 'it was all a movie" though.
Was it autism?
>my face when i've read gr twice and still feel that i don't fully get it
Basically all of part 4, t b h. That one passage from near the end of part 3 outlining the difference between the first war and the second one by comparing the love between soldiers in the trenches to the "idle and bitchy faggotry" of the higher ups was great too. And of course there's the Kenosha Kid segment.
There's actually a clue to the narrative structure on the first page:-
>this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into
By the end of the book, Slothrop's mounting paranoia has reached the point where his personality fragments. He becomes the first casualty of the Cold War and nuclear-age anxiety.
In a nutshell, GR is a book about the birth of the Cold War, and its effect on the human psyche. If you didn't live through it (or at least part of it), you may never understand it completely. When I was growing up, everybody more or less took it for granted that a nuke would drop on them one day.
> GR is about the cold war
eh, only sort of
> his personality fragments
nah, my nigga Tyrone went into hiding, got lost in the noise
Underworld is more explicitly about the cold war and people can still relate to it because the cold war is still going on, little hippy
>the cold war is still going on, little hippy
Yes, I hear they voted to keep it going at last year's Warsaw Pact conference.
Disagree. His paranoia doesn't mount, he loses it entirely. That's why he's "just feeling natural" - he recognises and truly comprehends the totally random and unconnected nature of existence, and the only reaction left is to dissipate. We can comnect this to the earlier passage about "anti-paranoia", which, we're told, no one can survive for long.
I remember reading this one before, along w/ the feghoot one.
It made me feel better about writing. I like people who are honest and straight-up about their flaws, even if it's only in private letters to friends.
Also graph paper is superior in every way to notebook paper. It allows you to handwrite monospace, and it's good for illustration, while retaining the benefits of lines. What's not to like?
>tfw just finished
The rocket hit the theatre in the beginning right? And that guy on the highway talking about being smothered by a plastic bag was talking about nukes right?
so we're post usa vs russia...hmmm...interesting reality you live in...
Huh. I never made a connection between 'it is all theatre' and the final scene taking place in an actual theatre til now. Nice.
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no, paranoia
the pie fight and toilet ship
nothin like some hijinks with the pynchmeister