/lit/ - Literature

>>7360811
>What exactly happened to Slothrop in the end?
The Zone got the better of him. Picking through the final stream of consciousness chapters it seems he ended up returning to Putzi's to get his discharge from Gerhardt Von Goll, though last we see of him he may or may not be in the bathroom dressed in drag. Skip ahead and of course it recaps he found his way into a session part for some obscures 60's rock band. About as happy an ending as poor SROP could have gotten.
>What is the significance of the 00000 rocket and the S-Gerät?
It was Blicero's final sacrifice to The System and may or may not have brought him spiritual transcendence. It was in that sense, a Rocket representative of everything The Counterforce stood against, it was the book's final hurrah for The System, reminding us that this cycle of Death goes far beyond political boundaries and does not end with V-E day. We have locked ourselves into something much more dangerous now. The book of course ends with the destruction of a theatre narrated in second person. It's maybe worth noting that before impact the film seems to screw up, and the image goes blank, and that every chapter signifier throughout the book looks like a strip of film to be spliced together. Have we been there the whole time, watching this mad movie? It, the theatre, can be thought of as another victim of WW2, of the V2's, perhaps even of Blicero's 00000 if you like your loose ends to tie up, but the second person narration implicates the reader as the next victim. WW2 has come to an end, but in it's place is the nuclear age.
>Did Slothrop actually subconsciously predict rocket strikes?
No. It was a statistical anomaly misread by the mad Generals and Scientists of the old world, unable to come to grips with the nature of modern war and truly random strikes of Death from Above.

The other day I was thinking on the book's opening.

>"A screaming comes across the sky."
What screaming? The screaming of a rocket, yes, a dreamt screaming of a dreamt rocket. But the V-2's are not heard in the sky. Is it the screaming of travel? Or the screaming which fills the air after explosion?
>It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre.
If this is a dream and nothing more, is this Evacuation literally 'too late'? Has the damage already been done as the screaming fills the sky and The Evacuation consisted only of men already dead piling into cars to escape the inescapable? The reversal of cause and effect in full swing?
>A screaming comes across the sky.
Or perhaps it is the screaming of the people below. Voices, remarking a V-2 on the horizon as Prentice does in the book's opening pages. But then why is The Evacuation all theatre? Can one V-2 do so much damage to render such an Evacuation useless? It hasn't shown to in the rest of the book, nor real life, posed a threat so big the entire city is wiped out. Is this perhaps the screaming of a nuclear strike? Where an Evacuation truly would be all theatre? Certainly topical for 1973 and the years leading up to it. It never seemed much of a WW2 book to me, concentration camps holding primarily Germans and Nazism being more or less a farcical evil.

Lastly,
>A screaming comes across the sky.
I do not think it would be unfair to boil the book down into Sex and Death. Could this also be the scream of an orgasm? Certainly 'come' is a word with its connotations, a word Pynchon himself uses in such a sexual way.

If so, the first sentence, be it describing a V-2 or Nuke portrays Sex and Death as intertwined in the very opening sentence.

Well, I'm no expert, but some thoughts I felt like sharing.