[ 3 / biz / cgl / ck / diy / fa / ic / jp / lit / sci / vr / vt ] [ index / top / reports ] [ become a patron ] [ status ]
2023-11: Warosu is now out of extended maintenance.

/lit/ - Literature

View post   
File: 103 KB, 392x574, Gravitys_rainbow_cover.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5881958 No.5881958 [Reply] [Original]

Well boys I finished it.

It feels like the graduation from /lit/. Is there a life on this board after finishing this book? Doubt it. It was always about this book. Always.

But please, for the love of god, someone explain part 4.

>> No.5881973

You need to read his all of his novels, then go back and reread them in roughly the historical time line they (mostly) take place in

Mason & Dixon > Against the Day > Gravity's Rainbow > V. > The Crying of Lot 49 > Inherent Vice > Vineland > Bleeding Edge

>> No.5881994

There are a lot of different readings you could give part 4, but the simplest and most broadly accepted is that the narrative fractures and loses focus as Slothrop loses his mind. It stops mattering to anyone, including Slothrop himself, including even the reader, where he is or whether he'll ever succeed in finding the rockets or understanding his own relationship to them and to Imipolex (he won't). Plus, kamikaze pilots!

>> No.5882026

im 100 pages in and everything thats happening in the white visitation is confusing as tits. what exactly are pirate and slothrop doing here ?_? help anon

>> No.5882050

>>5882026
All your answers are in Parts 1 and 2.

Slothrop is like a Little Albert experiment. Pointsman conditioned him from a child. Roger works out the models for where V-2 rockets hit in relation to where Slothrop had a sexual encounter, or came, jerked off etc. They are trying to find a pattern so they can predict the next location of V-2's hitting in or around London for obvious reasons...I mean, who wants to get hit by a giant, soundless mortar that can be launched from across the channel. You literally have no idea it's coming unless you see the parabola it makes, and even then it's already too late if you are going to be hit.

Pointsman investigates V-2 and other rocket sites.

This is all you need to know at this point.

The White Visitation is a front for these special operations, also there is Grigori...the giant octopus. Pointsman is attempting to get the stimulus for Slothrop to zero...an extinction of the stimulus.

...I'm so sorry Roger. ...Goddammit I'm so sorry Roger...and Pokler.

Forgive us, as mankind. Please.

>>5881958
Slothrop is ...fragmenting. He began losing his mind after Bianca....The whole book really wrapped up the surface premise of the 00000 in Poklers chapter where he stands where the bomb should hit....and nothing happens. And it all becomes absurd at that moment. None of it mattered after that. He was losing his mind, dying - all understanding of the rocket doesn't matter. Part 4 just begins wrapping the whole tragedy of post war, and those who it effected.

Now all that is left is for the launching of 00001...poor Enzian.

...poor Titcherine ....goddamit. Please forgive us for the war.

>> No.5882054

>>5881958
you better have also ready Infinite Jest otherwise you haven't graduated yet.

>> No.5882059

It also helps knowing that in part 4 there is a time jump to 1972 in case you missed it.

>> No.5882093

Have you read Ulysses

>> No.5882126

>>5882093
Oh, god. I read Ulysses and GR back to back...and I had no idea what to do afterwards.

What fucking book could I pick up that could follow those two?

>> No.5882288

>>5881958
I would tell you since I am the most well-informed reader of Pynchon on this board (I have read every word of Pynchon multiple times in the original English and every secondary source you can think) but a couple of your fellow posters have showed me a tremendous amount of disrespect this evening. Therefore, I will no longer be enlightening you mindless blanks on Pynchon, anti-war, bananas, humor, stamps, and poop-eating matters until I get the fucking respect I deserve. Fuck every single one of you. Fuck the moderators who delete my threads and my posts. I hope you all die.

>> No.5882297

>>5882288
Paradise plz go

>> No.5882326

>>5882059
In which part? Please elaborate.

>> No.5882333

>>5882297
wtf I am a nice guy wishing badness on no1

>> No.5882385

>>5882326
Part 4

There is one episode that jumps to 1972

You will know because it basically tells you and it feels different.

It's even in Chicago I believe.


Just fucking pay attention.

>> No.5882530

>>5881958
http://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gravitys/dp/0977312798%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-d-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0977312798

Can confirm this is awesome.

>> No.5882569

>>5882530
...pretty much how I pictured it...except not so Frank Miller on a bad trip. These pictures need to...lighten up a bit to be more accurate.


TOP KEK

Grigori and the crab.

>> No.5882588

>>5882530
they're cool drawings and pictures but if you've read the book, you realize it's very superficial

>> No.5882862
File: 9 KB, 185x273, finneganswake.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5882862

>>5881958
>graduation from /lit/

>> No.5882872

>>5882530
>http://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gravitys/dp/0977312798%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-d-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0977312798
i bought a used copy. looking at it now. its ok, doesnt always fit with the chapters. im thinking that its because everyone reads it differently. way to manipulate structuralism/deconstructionism pynchon

>> No.5882879

>>5882862
Yeah, that book is literally a joke by a shit tier author

>> No.5882969

>>5882879
0/10

>> No.5882978

Favorite book ever, read it twice. All of a sudden last night I get the twinge that I must read it again, I can't live without it you know? Plunge number 3 inbound I guess

>>5882059
it's a very brief section though. It's a symptom of the disintegration of part 4, not an explanation of it

>> No.5882998

>>5881958
OP could you provide a textual example and explain why it makes you love the books so much?

Otherwise I think you are not being genuine in your praise of the book.

>> No.5884035
File: 353 KB, 1019x918, untitled (2).png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5884035

We learn what everything was about in part 4 and the book folds in on itself.

>> No.5884113

>>5882054
I've read both and I'm still a major pleb

>> No.5884117

>>5882126
I just started ulysses after finishing GR... was this a mistake?

>> No.5884119

http://vocaroo.com/i/s1owEbIp1kWB

>> No.5884157

>>5882978
but there's also the theory that the book ends in 1972 with the rocket hitting the movie theatre. This makes sense to me because it completely derails time/cause and effect as a "finale" for the book, and finally breaking the relationship after bending it throughout the course of the book. It also makes sense if you view the book as cyclical - or at least deterministic - if you go back and read the very first page after finishing the references to film, frames, and theatre are quite obvious. Part 4 is not only about disintegration, but also it's an act of rebellion that mirrors the rebels of the book, like Roger, Byron and Slothrop - one final FUCK YOU. The narrative destroys itself symbolically as the rocket "betrays" gravity.

>> No.5884169

>>5884157
But there was no indication that the rocket did betray gravity, remember Gottfried was in the 00001, not the 00000.

>> No.5884192

>>5884169
Yeah sorry I misread what I was looking over. What I had in mind was the beginning of "Ascent": This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape....

>> No.5884209

>>5884192
Yes, definitely. The eternal pattern of manufactured ascent and then natural descent is repeated throughout Gravity's Rainbow and may be alluding to a general anthropological struggle, even.

But what I thought was intruiging were the deterministic functions even applied to nature and gravity, as if giving a sinister feel to gravity itself. That was something I didn't understand, Gravity, as a force, was analogous to widespread dissonance, essentially.

>> No.5884259

>>5884209

Yeah I think the conditioning in the novel is essential to contributing to that sinister view of nature. Control and manipulation of the individual becomes its nature. The blurring of cause and effect creates a reality where the conditioning never happened, it was simply always "natural" to the subject. Throw in the seance with Rathenau and the von Braun quote at the beginning... it just gets the mind reeling. It's crazy flipping to random page makes me get lost in the book all over again.

>> No.5884654

>>5881994
so uh, I like to think I understand the connections tenuously drawn between most of the random little adventures, and episodes but can someone explain the kamikaze pilots to me?

Is it just another expose on the absurdity inherent between the war, the technology, the people and the fear.

>> No.5884877

>>5884169
What? No, Gottfried was in the 00000. The book describes the launch of the 00000 and 00001 in parallel though.

>> No.5884891

>>5884877
The 00000 was never found, the end describes the launching of Gottfried in rocket 00001. Reread it man.

>> No.5884898

>>5884877
Oh never mind, the novel ends with flashbacks... god maybe I need to reread it'.. I will one day.

>> No.5884926

>>5884891
>>5884898
Yeah the end is flashing back to the launch of 00000 interspersed with the Hereros assembling 00001. If what you said we're right it would negate a lot of the Blicero/Thanatz/Greta timeline.

>> No.5885060

>>5884891
>>5884926
>>5884877

>The narrative even jumps forward in time to the 1970s, where a character named "Richard M. Zhlubb" operates a Los Angeles theater
> The story of the 00000's launch is largely told in flashbacks by the narrator, while in the present Enzian is constructing and preparing its successor, the 00001 (which isn't fired within the scope of the novel), though it is unknown who is intended to be sacrificed in this model. In the flashbacks, the maniacal Captain Blicero prepares to assemble and fire the 00000, and asks his adolescent sex slave Gottfried to sacrifice himself inside the rocket. He launches the rocket in a pseudo-sexual act of sacrifice with a bound Gottfried captive within its S-Gerät. The text halts, in the middle of a song composed by Slothrop's ancestor, with a complete obliteration of narrative as the 00000 lands (or is about to land) on a cinema.

OK I'm fucking confused.

>> No.5885093

Have you read Middlemarch? If not, you have only.
just.
begun.

>> No.5885157

>>5884877
>>5885060
This is correct

>>5884157
I don't know what you read, or what were you thinking while reading it but the time jump to the 70's is very brief and not that relevant

>> No.5885445

>>5885157
But the 70s narrative also ends with a rocket explosion. Where did it come from?

>> No.5886852

I just to the part of the book where Slothrop is diving in a toliet full of shit to fish out his harmonica while jazz negros pull his pants down and fiddle with his asshole. Thanks for recommending this great work of literature to me, /lit/. Otherwise, I would be reading some high school-tier pleb book where things actually happen.

>> No.5886884

>>5886852
Fun story, one of those negros is Malcolm X, attempting to rape Slothrop roughly 20 years before he'll rise to prominence in the American consciousness. Slothrop, through the haze of a drug induced hallucination, is seeing into the future in a strange way. He's also being tricked into revisiting the WASP's fear of the American negro which they hope to later exploit by sicking him on Enzian and the Hereros.

That's why people appreciate Pynchon. There are layers that reveal themselves upon multiple reads. Best of all, it's open not just for interpretation but also to meaning. Or meaninglessness just the same.

>> No.5886896

>>5886884
So interesting things actually happen in this book?

>> No.5886906

>>5886896
Yeah, it gets especially good in the middle part of the third section. The action picks up after the first part, and especially in the third part, when Slothrop treks out into the Zone.

I always tell people that the first 100 pages or so are a litmus test that Pynchon presents to his reader. He wants to verify that you can keep up with him (the weird character names, the long stretches of prose, the strangeness of the whole world) before he gets into the more basic plot.

>> No.5886915

>>5886906
Good to know. I will continue on then. Thanks.

>> No.5887169

>>5882126
The Recognitions

>> No.5888638

>>5886906
>I always tell people that the first 100 pages or so are a litmus test that Pynchon presents to his reader
What? The first 100 pages are fun as fuck. Bananas, Pirate, V2 ponderings, Slothrops hijinks, Novi Pazar consul and songs could keep even an ADHD kid entertained.

>> No.5888641

>>5881958
>someone explain part 4.

sounds like you didn't graduate at all mate if you didn't understand the book.