Gravity’s Rainbow is a long novel by Thomas Pynchon, published in 1973. It opens in London at the end of the Second World War, as V-2 rockets fall on the city, and moves on to defeated Germany as a search spreads out around a single special rocket, “00000.”
In 1974 it won the National Book Award. For the Pulitzer Prize, however, the fiction jury recommended it but the Advisory Board did not accept the recommendation, and no fiction prize was awarded that year［3］［4］. Ever since its publication, the book has carried a reputation as “difficult,” “obscene,” “impossible to finish,” and “the book people pretend to have read.”
The story itself, though, is not as elusive as that reputation suggests. A US Army lieutenant finds that the places where he has had sexual encounters somehow coincide with the places where V-2 rockets fall a few days later, and he sets out to discover what has been done to him.
The protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, learns that he was apparently the subject of a strange conditioning experiment as an infant, and eventually he is led to a rocket bearing the unusual serial number “00000” and to a mysterious device that seems to have been installed inside it. For all its hundreds of characters and countless digressions, this search lies at the center of the story.
What is truly hard is not that the book lacks a plot. It is that the standard for deciding whose account to trust never stabilizes, right to the end. Scientists put forward hypotheses, the military manipulates information, corporations and states are bound together, and events that looked like coincidences connect to other events. Readers have to judge for themselves how reliable each piece of information is within the novel.
This article sets out what kind of work Gravity’s Rainbow is: a spoiler-free summary, where its “unreadable” reputation comes from, why it is difficult, its Japanese translations, how to read it, its characters, history versus fiction, its main themes, and what the ending does and does not settle. The first half does not discuss the ending; the second half contains full spoilers. Detailed interpretations of the novel are covered in “How Can Gravity’s Rainbow Be Read?”.
Contents
- What is Gravity’s Rainbow?
- A spoiler-free summary of Gravity’s Rainbow
- Is it really “unreadable” and “obscene”?
- Why is Gravity’s Rainbow so difficult?
- Reading it in Japanese: the old and new translations
- How to read Gravity’s Rainbow without giving up
- The four parts of Gravity’s Rainbow, one line each
- Detailed plot summary [spoilers]
- Main characters
- Main organizations
- How much of Gravity’s Rainbow is true?
- Five keywords for understanding the themes of Gravity’s Rainbow
- What does the title “Gravity’s Rainbow” mean?
- What the ending settles, and what it does not
- So what is Gravity’s Rainbow about?
- Frequently asked questions
- Summary
- About the research for this article
- Notes
What is Gravity’s Rainbow?
Gravity’s Rainbow is Thomas Pynchon’s third novel, published in 1973 by Viking Press in New York. It followed his first novel, V. (1963), and his second, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); the first edition ran to 760 pages［1］. The book consists of four parts, each divided internally by untitled breaks. Scholarship and reading guides commonly count these as 21 + 8 + 32 + 12, for a total of 73 sections, but the novel itself does not number them as “Chapter 1” through “Chapter 73.”
Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937. He served in the Navy before graduating from Cornell University, and after graduating worked on technical documentation at Boeing from 1960 to 1962［2］. His career thus gives a documented basis for his exposure to the technical vocabulary of rockets, guidance, and the arms industry, but no statement by Pynchon himself has been found to the effect that “his experience at Boeing directly gave rise to particular scenes in Gravity’s Rainbow.”
In 1974 it shared the National Book Award for Fiction with Isaac Bashevis Singer’s A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories［3］. What happened with that year’s Pulitzer Prize is discussed below.
Gravity’s Rainbow has been discussed under such frameworks as the postmodern novel, the encyclopedic novel, and the systems novel［14］. There is no need to memorize these categories at the outset. The questions that drive the story are relatively simple: “Why is there a strange correspondence between Slothrop’s body and the V-2 impact sites?” “What is carried in the rocket called 00000?” “Who is pursuing it?”
What sets it apart from an ordinary quest narrative is that, as the evidence accumulates, the answers do not converge on one solution; several possible explanations remain open. The relationship between Gravity’s Rainbow and the concept of the “mega-novel” is covered in detail in a separate article, “What Is a Mega-Novel?”.
A spoiler-free summary of Gravity’s Rainbow
The story begins in the winter of 1944, in a London under V-2 rocket attack. The V-2 arrived at supersonic speed, so it was almost impossible to hear any warning sound before impact［9］. On the ground, this could produce a perceptual reversal in which the sound of the rocket’s approach arrives only after the explosion. This phenomenon is the entry point to a problem that recurs from the novel’s opening onward: in what order do we understand cause and effect?
US Army Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop marks the places where he has had sexual encounters with stars on a map of London. When the statistician Roger Mexico compares the map with the V-2 impact sites, he finds a strange correspondence: rockets appear to fall on the spots Slothrop starred a few days after he starred them.
The Pavlovian psychologist Edward Pointsman becomes intensely interested in this coincidence. In the course of investigating it, records turn up suggesting that as an infant Slothrop was an experimental subject of a chemist named Laszlo Jamf and was conditioned to respond sexually to a certain stimulus. Slothrop himself knows nothing of this, and the military and the researchers observe him without telling him.
Eventually Slothrop finds in documents a rocket bearing the impossible serial number “00000,” a device apparently installed inside it called the “Schwarzgerät,” and the name of a special plastic, “Imipolex G.” Realizing that he is being watched, he flees and makes his way into defeated Germany.
But he is not the only one searching for 00000. The military, intelligence services, engineers, black marketeers, the Soviets, corporations, and even a Herero rocket unit carrying a history that stretches back to German South West Africa all close in on the same rocket, each for its own purposes.
The protagonist and the reader start from nearly the same place. Slothrop does not know what was done to him, and neither does the reader. Clues are supplied in great quantity, but how far causal relationships actually hold between them is not easily settled.
Is it really “unreadable” and “obscene”? The legends of Gravity’s Rainbow
Gravity’s Rainbow has several reputations almost as famous as the book itself: “impossible to finish,” “obscene,” “rejected by the Pulitzer Prize,” “the classic book people pretend to have read,” “even the judges never finished it.” These do not stem from a single event. They appear in different sources: contemporary reviews from 1973, press coverage of the 1974 literary prizes, and later publishers’ descriptions and articles.
It was judged “difficult” from the start
The view that Gravity’s Rainbow is hard to read is not an urban legend invented after the fact. Immediately after publication in 1973, Richard Poirier praised the work’s enormous scale and its form, which binds together history, technology, and culture. Richard Locke, in The New York Times Book Review, called it one of the longest, most difficult, and most ambitious novels of its time, while also criticizing the later sections as stretching the structure to its limit and producing fatigue and irritation in the reader［5］.
In other words, from the time of publication, the judgment that it was “an extremely ambitious and excellent work” and the judgment that it was “an extremely hard-to-read work” existed side by side.
1974: the National Book Award, and no Pulitzer awarded
In 1974, Gravity’s Rainbow won the National Book Award for Fiction［3］. Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prizes’ official records list 1974 as a year of “no award” in the Novel/Fiction category［4］.
According to Peter Kihss’s report in The New York Times of May 8, 1974, the three members of the fiction jury unanimously recommended Gravity’s Rainbow, but the Pulitzer Advisory Board did not accept the recommendation［4］. Later sources that refer to this article quote words such as “unreadable,” “turgid,” “overwritten,” and “obscene” as the board’s reaction.
It is therefore wrong to say that “Gravity’s Rainbow won the Pulitzer Prize.” At the same time, it is not appropriate to describe it as “an official finalist” in the sense the term has under the current system. The accurate statement is that the jury recommended it, the board did not accept the recommendation, and no fiction prize was awarded in 1974.
Shinchōsha introduces it as an “ultra-dangerous work” that the prize “refused to judge”
The official page for the 2014 Shinchōsha edition introduces the work as “an ultra-dangerous work that the Pulitzer Prize refused to judge, calling it ‘obscene’ and ‘unreadable’”［6］. The introduction to a publication interview on the same page uses a different expression: “it was refused the prize by the Pulitzer Prize Board”［6］.
Looking closely at the history, it is not the case that the fiction category was never judged. The jury did recommend the work; it was that recommendation the board declined to accept［4］.
“Nobody can finish it” is a separate matter
In the English-speaking world, Gravity’s Rainbow later came to appear in writing about “books people pretend to have read.” For example, in 2007 The Harvard Crimson ran a piece discussing Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read under the title “You’ve Read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’? Bullshit”［7］.
However, for explanations circulating in Japanese such as “number one in a ranking of books American college students pretend to have read” or “not a single National Book Award judge read it to the end,” our research so far has not been able to confirm a reliable primary source. The fact that it was an extremely difficult book from the time of publication and the later legend that no one has ever finished it therefore need to be treated separately.
Why is Gravity’s Rainbow so difficult?
The main reason Gravity’s Rainbow is difficult is not simply its page count. It is long, of course, with many characters and a great deal of science. But what is more troublesome is that the very criteria for organizing the information are unstable.
First, there are a great many characters. Some appear only once; others become important later. Real and fictional people are mixed together, and Slothrop himself adopts several names and roles, such as Rocketman, in the course of his flight. If you try to remember every name with the same degree of importance, the main storylines become harder to see.
Second, the point of view shifts without warning. In most long novels, the first or third person, or the viewpoint character of each chapter, is fixed to some degree. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the narration may move from a character’s inner life to a narrator, become something like a film camera, or connect to dreams or a collective consciousness. Readers are confused not only by the content but also because it is never stable “whose perception is being presented.”
Third, history and fiction are written with the same density. The V-2 rocket, IG Farben, German colonialism, forced labor, and the postwar scramble for technology all have real historical backgrounds［9］［10］［11］［12］［13］. Jamf, Imipolex G, the special device in 00000, PISCES, and so on are fiction. Yet the novel does not visually distinguish history from fiction.
The scientific terminology is not mere decoration, either. Statistics, probability, Pavlovian conditioning, rocket engineering, thermodynamics, chemistry, polymers, and ballistic calculation bear on the very structure of the story. In the problem of Slothrop’s map and the V-2 impact sites, for example, observing a correspondence is one thing and proving a causal relationship behind it is another. Pointsman, however, tries to find a single cause behind that correspondence.
The style and genre are not constant either. What seems to begin as a war novel switches in quick succession to scenes resembling a spy novel, a detective story, pornography, a musical, slapstick, theology, horror, and animation. This makes it hard to sustain a single way of reading over hundreds of pages.
And the biggest problem is that it becomes unclear whose hypothesis is whose. Slothrop was conditioned as an infant; Imipolex G is related to his sexual responses; corporations and states are connected behind the scenes—various explanations appear in the novel. But not all of them are guaranteed as fact with the same strength. Observation, documents, memory, researchers’ conjectures, military propaganda, dreams, films, rumors, and chance all coexist within the same work.
In short, the difficulty of Gravity’s Rainbow lies less in “not understanding what is written” than in the fact that it never becomes stable which of the information on the page should be treated as certain, and to what degree.
Reading it in Japanese: the old and new translations
There are two main Japanese translations of Gravity’s Rainbow (Jūryoku no niji). The first was published in 1993 in two volumes in Kokusho Kankōkai’s “Bungaku no bōken” (Adventures in Literature) series. It was translated by four people—Koshikawa Yoshiaki, Saeki Yasuki, Ueno Tatsurō, and Hatayama Hideaki—and as of September 8, 2026, the publisher lists it as out of stock with no reprint scheduled［8］.
The version currently easy to buy new is the translation by Satō Yoshiaki, published in 2014 by Shinchōsha in its “Thomas Pynchon Complete Novels” series. It is also in two volumes, each 752 pages. As of September 8, 2026, each volume is priced at 5,170 yen, for a total of 10,340 yen［6］.
The Shinchōsha edition includes detailed notes, a commentary, and an index［6］. An interview at the time of publication noted that seven years had passed since the translation began, and Satō himself described the actual amount of work as “a thousand days, ten thousand hours”［8］.
This article makes no judgment about the relative merits of the old and new translations themselves, because we have not systematically compared the same passages in both. In practical terms—being available new and allowing the reader to use notes and an index of people and topics while reading—the Shinchōsha edition is currently the easier one to use.
How to read Gravity’s Rainbow without giving up
Reduced to a minimum for a first reading, the storylines can be divided into the following four.
- Slothrop—What was done to him?
- 00000—What is in the special rocket?
- Pointsman / Jamf—Who is experimenting on and observing Slothrop?
- Enzian / Blicero—How does the rocket connect with the history of German colonialism?
Once you enter Part 3, place names and characters multiply rapidly. Here it helps to distinguish not only geographical movement but each character’s “object of search.” Slothrop pursues his own past and 00000; Enzian pursues 00000; Tchitcherine pursues German rocket technology and his half-brother Enzian; and Pökler becomes tied to rocket development and a past involving his family.
It also becomes easier to tell the novel’s storylines apart if you have a grasp of four historical facts: the V-2 rocket, forced labor at Mittelbau-Dora, the postwar acquisition of German technology by the US and the USSR, and colonial violence against the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa［9］［10］［11］［13］.
If you lose track of where a piece of information stands, it helps to sort it along three questions: “Whose viewpoint or information is this?” “Which line does it belong to—Slothrop, 00000, the institutions, or the Herero?” “Is it an event in the text, a character’s hypothesis, or a dream, film, or piece of propaganda?” If you are using the Shinchōsha edition, the notes and the index of people and topics at the back can also be used to check characters［6］.
Note that the novel contains scenes involving non-consensual sex, sexual abuse of minors, excrement, torture, and concentration camps. On a first reading, you do not need to resolve every source of quotation or scientific and historical reference on the spot; you can grasp the overall structure by first following the main characters and the storyline around 00000.
Spoilers from here on
What follows covers the ending of Gravity’s Rainbow, 00000, the Schwarzgerät, and Slothrop’s fate in the final part.
The four parts of Gravity’s Rainbow, one line each
| Part | Main setting | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Part 1: “Beyond the Zero” | London, late 1944 | The mysteries of Slothrop’s map, the V-2, and the infant experiment are introduced |
| Part 2: “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering” | Southern France | Slothrop realizes he is under surveillance and begins to flee in pursuit of 00000 |
| Part 3: “In the Zone” | Defeated Germany | The search for 00000 spreads out into corporations, colonialism, forced labor, and the US–Soviet scramble for technology |
| Part 4: “The Counterforce” | Germany + the past + the future | Slothrop is scattered from the center of the story, and the past of 00000 is revealed |
Detailed plot summary of Gravity’s Rainbow [spoilers]
Part 1, “Beyond the Zero”: Slothrop’s body and the V-2
In December 1944, V-2 attacks on London continue. The story begins with Pirate Prentice and branches out into the lines of the White Visitation, a base for psychological research and intelligence; the statistician Roger Mexico; the Pavlovian psychologist Edward Pointsman; US Army Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop; and others.
Slothrop records the places where he has had sexual encounters with stars on a map of London. When Roger Mexico compares it with the map of V-2 strikes, the stars appear to precede rocket strikes on the same spots by several days. Mexico, a statistician, treats the V-2 strikes as a probability distribution, but Pointsman is not satisfied with chance and looks for a cause behind it.
The investigation leads to records suggesting that Slothrop, as an infant, underwent conditioning experiments by Laszlo Jamf. Without informing Slothrop, the military and the researchers begin observing him as a test subject.
What the text establishes at this point is that an anomalous correspondence has been observed between Slothrop’s map and the V-2 impact sites, and that records of the infant experiment exist. What causal relationship, if any, holds between the two is not settled.
Part 2, “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering”: 00000
Slothrop is sent to the south of France on “leave.” But the leave itself is part of the experiment: everything, down to his meeting Katje Borgesius and the attack by and rescue from Grigori, a trained octopus, has been arranged to observe Slothrop’s reactions.
Meanwhile, Slothrop examines documents and notices a rocket with the unusual serial number “00000.” A device called the “S-Gerät / Schwarzgerät” and a special plastic called Imipolex G, said to have been created by the chemist Jamf, also come into view.
Realizing he is being watched, Slothrop escapes. At this point he changes from a subject observed by researchers into a searcher pursuing his own past and 00000. It has been shown that 00000, the Schwarzgerät, Imipolex G, and Jamf are close to one another in some way, but the causal relationship between Slothrop himself and these things is still not settled.
Part 3, “In the Zone”: the search expands into world history
Germany is defeated, and its order as a state collapses. The novel depicts the space in which occupying armies, refugees, former soldiers, black marketeers, and engineers mingle as “the Zone.” Slothrop moves through places such as Nordhausen and the remains of the underground rocket factory, and learns that his father and the industrialist Lyle Bland may have been involved in his infant experiment.
Meanwhile, another group searching for 00000 appears: the Schwarzkommando led by Enzian. They are people with a Herero history that reaches back to German South West Africa, and they are placed in the position of handling German rocket technology themselves. The Soviet officer Tchitcherine also appears; while pursuing German rocket technology, he is obsessed with killing his half-brother, Enzian.
The past of the rocket engineer Franz Pökler is also told. Pökler worked on rocket development under Blicero’s control, with visits from his daughter Ilse used as leverage over him. He makes a component of Imipolex G for the Schwarzgerät.
Here the mystery of 00000 spreads far beyond Slothrop’s individual body. The engineers who built the rocket, the military, chemical corporations, forced labor, colonialism, and the postwar acquisition of technology by the US and the USSR converge within the same novel. The story of Slothrop investigating “what was done to him” gradually expands into multiple lines concerning social institutions and history.
At the same time, Slothrop’s own search gradually loses focus. He disguises himself in several guises, including Rocketman, and keeps moving across Europe. By this point the components of 00000 have become fairly visible, but no single “truth” that unifies them is presented.
Part 4, “The Counterforce”: the protagonist is scattered and the rocket remains
In Part 4, the novel itself becomes even more fragmented. Roger Mexico, Pirate, Katje, and others draw close to the “Counterforce,” which tries to resist the vast system of military, corporate, and psychological control.
In the Schwarzkommando, Enzian and his people assemble a new rocket, 00001, from scrapped parts. Slothrop, meanwhile, who had been the story’s protagonist, gets neither a resolution of the case in the ordinary sense nor a death scene. He gradually vanishes from the center of the story and comes to be spoken of in the form of rumors, photographs, memories, and traces.
Then, at the very end, the past of 00000, which Slothrop had pursued for so long, is revealed. Blicero, a German rocket commander, wraps the young Gottfried in Imipolex G and places him inside 00000. The text ultimately presents Gottfried himself as the Schwarzgerät, refusing to separate the mechanical device from the human body in any simple way.
The rocket is launched, rises, reaches burnout, and enters its ballistic trajectory. There the story leaps across time and connects to the Orpheus Theater, a fictional movie theater in Los Angeles around 1970. The rocket is directly above the theater’s roof, but neither the moment of impact nor the explosion is depicted. The novel ends just before it.
Main characters in Gravity’s Rainbow
Gravity’s Rainbow has characters numbering in the hundreds, but keeping the following twelve in mind first makes it easier to tell the main storylines apart.
| Character | Overview |
|---|---|
| Tyrone Slothrop | US Army lieutenant. Becomes an object of observation because of the correspondence between his map of sexual encounters and the V-2 impact sites; pursues 00000 |
| Edward Pointsman | Pavlovian psychologist. Tries to find a single cause for the Slothrop phenomenon |
| Roger Mexico | Statistician. Treats V-2 strikes as a matter of probability, taking an epistemic position different from Pointsman’s |
| Katje Borgesius | A woman involved in intelligence and surveillance. Was also with Blicero |
| Laszlo Jamf | Fictional chemist. Links Slothrop’s infant experiment and Imipolex G |
| Blicero / Weissmann | German rocket commander. The central figure of 00000 |
| Gottfried | A young man under Blicero’s control. Is loaded into 00000 |
| Enzian | Leader of the Schwarzkommando, the Herero rocket unit |
| Vaslav Tchitcherine | Soviet officer. Pursues German technology and his half-brother Enzian |
| Franz Pökler | German rocket engineer. Makes special rocket components while his family is used as leverage against him |
| Pirate Prentice | Associated with the British SOE. Connects the early intelligence line with the later line of resistance |
| Jessica Swanlake | Roger Mexico’s lover |
Main organizations in Gravity’s Rainbow
| Organization | Real / fictional | Role |
|---|---|---|
| PISCES | Fictional | Psychological and intelligence research organization involving Pointsman, Mexico, and others |
| The White Visitation | Fictional | Base for psychological, paranormal, and intelligence research |
| ACHTUNG | Fictional | The technical intelligence unit to which Slothrop belongs |
| SOE | Real | The British Special Operations Executive, though the characters and missions in the novel include fiction |
| Schwarzkommando | Fictional | Herero rocket unit |
| IG Farben | Real | Giant German chemical conglomerate, with historical ties to the Nazi regime and to forced labor［12］ |
How much of Gravity’s Rainbow is true? The V-2, Dora, Paperclip, and IG Farben
An important point in reading Gravity’s Rainbow is that historical fact and Pynchon’s fiction are mixed together.
The V-2 rocket is real
The V-2 was a real ballistic missile deployed by Nazi Germany at the end of the Second World War, and in 1944–45 it struck London and other targets［9］. The UK National Archives explains that because the V-2 flew at the speed of sound, it made no warning noise before impact, and defense against it was nearly impossible［9］.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, the V-2 is not merely a weapon. Many storylines—Slothrop’s body, statistics, scientific research, corporations, the military, religion—intersect through the V-2.
Forced labor at Mittelbau-Dora is also real
The production of the V-2 and other weapons relied on the labor of prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents that prisoners at Dora-Mittelbau were forced to work manufacturing V-weapons［10］.
This is not a premise invented by the novel. Rocket technology and forced labor were actually linked in history. To treat the novel’s rockets solely as technical or symbolic entities is therefore to leave out the history of production that the work refers to.
Rocket technology did not end when the war did
After Germany’s defeat, both the United States and the Soviet Union absorbed German V-2 technology, documents, equipment, and engineers into their own rocket and missile programs［11］. In the US, German scientists and engineers were brought over through Operation Paperclip. The Soviet Union also acquired documents and equipment at Peenemünde and Nordhausen and used German engineers to reconstruct the V-2［11］.
In other words, Nazi Germany’s rocket technology did not disappear with the defeat of 1945. The history in which technology, experts, and documents passed to other states even after the political regime changed provides background for understanding the continuity between war and postwar in Gravity’s Rainbow.
IG Farben is real; Imipolex G is fictional
The real company IG Farben appears in the novel. IG Farben was deeply bound up with the Nazi regime and, at Auschwitz-Monowitz, used the labor of concentration camp prisoners for its synthetic rubber and fuel plant［12］. Jamf and Imipolex G, on the other hand, are fictional.
In this way, real corporate history and a fictional chemical substance are placed within the same story. Readers therefore find themselves needing outside sources to check how much of the novel is historical fact and where Pynchon’s fiction begins.
The history of the Herero and Nama also has a real background
From 1904 to 1908, in German South West Africa—present-day Namibia—German colonial troops waged a war of annihilation against the Herero and Nama. The German federal government recognizes this violence as genocide and states that around 100,000 people died from violence, thirst, the camps, and other causes［13］.
The German Historical Museum records that surviving Herero were confined in concentration camps and that thousands died from forced labor and appalling conditions of internment［13］. The Schwarzkommando of Gravity’s Rainbow is itself fictional, but the history of German colonialism its members carry is not.
Five keywords for understanding the themes of Gravity’s Rainbow
Paranoia
One of the key words in Gravity’s Rainbow is paranoia. Slothrop’s map and the rockets, Jamf and the chemical companies, the state and the military, corporations and war, colonialism and the rocket—within the novel, many elements are in fact connected.
Whether one can go from these individual connections to the conclusion that there exists “a single will unifying everything” is another matter. Since shortly after publication, paranoia has been a central issue in criticism of Gravity’s Rainbow［5］［14］. The history of its interpretation is covered in a separate article, “How Has Gravity’s Rainbow Been Read? A History of Interpretation and Criticism”.
Conditioning and probability
Pointsman and Roger Mexico represent two different ways of seeing the world. Pointsman emphasizes Pavlovian conditioned reflexes and looks for causes behind visible phenomena. Mexico, by contrast, treats V-2 strikes as a probability distribution.
Slothrop’s map brings these two into collision. That there is a correspondence between the map and the V-2s is not the same as being able to assign that correspondence a single cause. This problem extends into the epistemic structure of the novel as a whole.
00000 and the Schwarzgerät
00000 is a special rocket with which Blicero was involved. Unlike an ordinary V-2, it carries inside it something called the Schwarzgerät—German for “black device.” The storylines of Slothrop, Enzian, Pökler, and others approach 00000 by separate routes.
In the final part, the text presents Gottfried himself as the Schwarzgerät. The Schwarzgerät therefore cannot be explained purely as a mechanical device, and the novel does not let the distinction between device and human being stabilize.
Imipolex G
Imipolex G is a fictional plastic in the novel. Said to have been developed by the chemist Jamf, it is linked both to Slothrop’s infant conditioning and to the device inside 00000.
However, there is no guarantee from outside the work that “Imipolex G was the cause of Slothrop’s sexual responses.” Jamf’s experimental records, Slothrop’s responses, and the components of 00000 are connected, but the causal relationship among them is never fully settled within the novel.
The Elect and the Preterite
In Gravity’s Rainbow, the religious distinction between the “Elect” and the “Preterite” (the passed-over, those not chosen) appears again and again. Imbalances between those who run the war and those who suffer its effects, between those who experiment and those who are experimented on, and between those who control technology and the bodies made into its material also recur throughout the novel.
In the history of criticism, there have been readings that extend this Elect/Preterite distinction to the structures of selection, institutions, and sacrifice that appear in the novel［14］. Gottfried, the forced laborers, and the colonized peoples cannot, however, all be reduced to one and the same meaning.
What does the title “Gravity’s Rainbow” mean?
The most direct way in is the rocket’s trajectory. In 1973, George Levine discussed the parabola of the rocket’s flight as the shape of “gravity’s rainbow” itself［15］.
Tony Tanner, for his part, pointed out that the “rainbow” of the title evokes Noah’s rainbow in Genesis［15］. The biblical rainbow is the sign of the covenant made after the Flood between God and the living things of the earth. In Gravity’s Rainbow, by contrast, the curve drawn across the sky is also the trajectory of a weapon, the V-2.
Criticism has thus discussed at least two layers in the title: the rocket’s trajectory and a reference to the biblical rainbow［15］. The meaning of the title is not fixed to a single one.
What the ending settles, and what it does not
What makes Gravity’s Rainbow hard to sort out after finishing it is that, despite the huge amount of information provided, it does not all come together into a single “truth.” Here we separate what the text establishes, what the characters conjecture, and what remains unsettled to the end.
Are Slothrop’s map and the V-2s really connected?
What is established is that the novel begins with an anomalous correspondence between the map recording Slothrop’s sexual encounters and the V-2 impact sites, and that Pointsman and his colleagues make it an object of study.
As for what the characters think, Pointsman looks for conditioning as the cause behind it and tries to link Jamf’s infant experiment, Imipolex G, and Slothrop’s sexual responses into a single causal chain.
What is not established is whether that causal relationship actually holds. In the later parts, even the verifiability of the women Slothrop marked on his map becomes unstable. It is therefore not possible to state, as an established premise of the text, that “Slothrop has the ability to sexually predict V-2 strikes.”
What happens to Slothrop in the end?
Slothrop has no conventional death scene. Nor is there a scene in which he solves the case and returns home safely. In Part 4 he gradually fades from the center of the story and is spoken of as something like photographs, rumors, memories, and traces.
The text only depicts the process by which Slothrop is “scattered” and does not explicitly settle whether he lives or dies. In the history of criticism, there are readings that connect this ending to the decomposition or disappearance of the subject.
Is 00001 the same rocket as 00000?
No. 00000 is the special V-2 that Blicero launched during the war, with Gottfried on board. 00001, by contrast, is a different rocket that Enzian and the Schwarzkommando assemble from scrapped parts in Part 4. The text depicts the process of completing 00001 but not its launch or impact.
Is the final rocket 00000?
The text reveals that, in the past, Blicero loaded Gottfried into 00000 and launched it. The narration then jumps to a movie theater in Los Angeles around 1970 and ends at the moment the rocket descends to just above the roof. Structurally, the story strongly superimposes these two.
However, the novel does not explain that “00000, launched in 1945, physically travels through time and falls on a movie theater in 1970.” Nor is there any scene in which the rocket actually strikes the theater.
What the text establishes goes only this far: the descent of 00000 and the rocket above the theater are connected within the story, and the work ends at the moment just before impact.
What is Gravity’s Rainbow about?
Here we give an overview of the work as a whole in light of the history of criticism since its publication.
Gravity’s Rainbow raises a great many issues: war, science, corporations, colonialism, sex, religion, probability, entropy, film, and more. From the 1970s onward, the work was discussed mainly in terms of paranoia, encyclopedism, and vast social systems; later, research also accumulated that brought the focus back to specific histories such as colonialism, race, gender, the Holocaust, and the environment［14］.
What matters is that not all the connections in the novel’s world are delusions. Rocket production and forced labor were in fact linked historically; Nazi Germany’s rocket technology passed to the US and the USSR after the defeat; and companies such as IG Farben were connected to the state, the war, and forced labor［10］［11］［12］. German colonialism and the history of the Herero and Nama are likewise not a background the novel created from nothing［13］.
At the same time, criticism has repeatedly examined whether these many connections can be gathered into a single complete “system.” Edward Mendelson discussed the work as encyclopedic narrative, while Luc Herman and Petrus van Ewijk later reexamined the very idea that Gravity’s Rainbow possesses complete totality［14］.
For this reason, readings that fix Gravity’s Rainbow simply as “a novel that exposes a vast conspiracy” have been repeatedly revised over the history of its criticism. The work contains real power relations and historical connections, but whether they can all be gathered into a single will, a single causal relationship, or a single meaning remains unsettled.
The shifts in interpretation over more than fifty years are covered in detail in a separate article, “How Has Gravity’s Rainbow Been Read? A History of Interpretation and Criticism”. The relationship between giant novels like Gravity’s Rainbow, which take in vast numbers of characters, bodies of knowledge, institutions, histories, and styles, and the concept of the “mega-novel” is covered in “What Is a Mega-Novel?”.
Frequently asked questions
Q. Did Gravity’s Rainbow win the Pulitzer Prize?
A. No. The Pulitzer Prizes’ official records list 1974 as a year with no award in the Novel/Fiction category［4］. The fiction jury recommended Gravity’s Rainbow, but the board did not accept the recommendation. The 1974 National Book Award for Fiction, on the other hand, was shared with Isaac Bashevis Singer［3］.
Q. Is Gravity’s Rainbow really that difficult?
A. Yes. Besides the number of characters, sudden shifts in point of view, specialized scientific and historical knowledge, and changes of genre, a major factor in its difficulty is how hard it is to distinguish facts in the text from the characters’ hypotheses.
Q. What does the rocket symbolize?
A. Criticism has not fixed it as a symbol with a single meaning. The rocket has been discussed as a point where multiple issues intersect: technology, the military, corporations, colonialism, sex, religion, sacrifice, and more［14］［15］.
Q. Why is there so much sexual content?
A. In the novel, the control of sex and the body—such as the conditioning of Slothrop’s sexual responses and the relationship of domination between Blicero and Gottfried—is built into the main storylines. That said, there is no need to reduce every sexual depiction to a single symbol or a single function.
Q. Does the vast conspiracy of “They” in the novel really exist?
A. Concrete connections among the military, corporations, research institutions, intelligence services, and so on do exist in the novel. But the text does not identify a single secret society that controls all of them in a unified way. Criticism has offered readings that understand They as a system made up of multiple institutions and power structures［14］.
Q. Does Slothrop die?
A. There is no death scene. In Part 4 he is gradually scattered from the story and is spoken of in the form of traces and rumors. Neither “he died” nor “he got away” is established in the text.
Q. Where does the final rocket fall?
A. The impact is not depicted. The past launch of 00000 and a rocket descending over a movie theater around 1970 are connected within the story, and the novel ends at the moment the rocket is directly above the roof.
Q. Which Japanese translation should I read, the old one or the new one?
A. The old translation is the 1993 Kokusho Kankōkai edition, currently listed by the publisher as out of stock with no reprint scheduled. The new translation is Satō Yoshiaki’s 2014 Shinchōsha edition, which includes detailed notes, a commentary, and an index［6］［8］. The one easier to obtain new at present is the Shinchōsha edition.
Summary
The starting point of Gravity’s Rainbow is surprisingly simple. A man whose map of sexual encounters strangely corresponds to the V-2 impact sites learns that he was apparently experimented on as an infant, and begins to pursue a single special rocket, 00000.
But the more he investigates, the more connections multiply instead of answers. The rocket leads to psychology, corporations, war, forced labor, colonialism, and postwar science and technology, and what had been the protagonist’s personal mystery expands into a problem of vast history and institutions.
Gravity’s Rainbow is difficult not because nothing can be understood. It is difficult because, although so much of its information is interconnected, it remains unsettled to the end how far all of it can be gathered into one causal relationship, one system, or one meaning.
About the research for this article
This article is based on audited research materials prepared on the work’s bibliography, the structure of its four parts, characters and organizations, chronology, historical sources on the V-2, Mittelbau-Dora, IG Farben, and the postwar scramble for technology, the relationship among 00000, the Schwarzgerät, and Imipolex G, the sources of its difficulty, discussions of the title, the Japanese translations, and its prize history.
Regarding the work, we followed the principle of not treating events presented in the text, characters’ explanations and hypotheses, external historical facts, and scholars’ interpretations at the same level. In particular, for the causal relationship between Slothrop’s map and the V-2s, the relationship between Imipolex G and the conditioning, Slothrop’s ultimate fate, the relationship between 00000 and the rocket above the movie theater, and explanations that treat “They” as a single secret organization, we have separated what the text establishes from interpretation.
In addition, claims such as “Gravity’s Rainbow won the Pulitzer Prize,” “it was an official Pulitzer finalist in the sense the term has under the current system,” “his work at Boeing directly gave rise to particular scenes,” “PISCES really existed in the same form as in the novel,” “number one in a ranking of books American college students pretend to have read,” and “not a single literary prize judge read it to the end” have not been adopted as fact on the basis of the sources currently available.
Criticism and interpretation, from contemporary reviews in 1973 to the present, have been researched separately. In this article we have limited ourselves to what general readers need to understand the work, and where scholars’ interpretations are used, we have distinguished them as such in the text. Details are covered in a separate article, “How Has Gravity’s Rainbow Been Read? A History of Interpretation and Criticism”.
Notes
Some sources below are in Japanese; their original titles are given with English translations in brackets.
1. CiNii Books, “Gravity’s rainbow”. Confirms the bibliographic information “First published in the United States of America by the Viking Press, 1973” and 760 pages.
2. MacArthur Foundation, “Thomas Pynchon”. Records his service in the US Navy (1955–1957), graduation from Cornell University (1959), and employment as a technical writer at Boeing Aircraft Company (1960–1962). See also the author biography in 国書刊行会『重力の虹 1』 [Kokusho Kankōkai, Gravity’s Rainbow vol. 1].
3. National Book Foundation, “National Book Awards 1974”. Gravity’s Rainbow and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories are recorded as the winners in Fiction.
4. The Pulitzer Prizes, “YEARS OF NO AWARDS”. Explicitly lists 1974 as a year of no award in the Novel/Fiction category. On the jury’s recommendation and the board’s rejection, see Peter Kihss, “Pulitzer Jurors Dismayed on Pynchon,” The New York Times, May 8, 1974, p. 38.
5. Richard Poirier, “Rocket Power,” Saturday Review, March 3, 1973; see the reprint at ThomasPynchon.com. Richard Locke, “One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years,” The New York Times Book Review, March 11, 1973; see the New York Times reprint page and reprinted materials.
6. 新潮社『重力の虹（上）』 [Shinchōsha, Gravity’s Rainbow vol. 1] and 「トマス・ピンチョン全小説」 [Thomas Pynchon Complete Novels]. Published September 30, 2014; two volumes of 752 pages each, 5,170 yen each. The official description’s phrase “an ultra-dangerous work that [the Pulitzer Prize] refused to judge, calling it ‘obscene’ and ‘unreadable’” and the information about the notes, commentary, and index also come from these pages.
7. Madeline K. B. Ross, “You’ve Read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’? Bullshit,” The Harvard Crimson, April 6, 2007. An article discussing Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Cited as one example of the later image of a “tough book people pretend to have read”; not used as a source for any ranking.
8. 国書刊行会『重力の虹 1』 [Kokusho Kankōkai, Gravity’s Rainbow vol. 1]. The old translation, by Koshikawa Yoshiaki, Saeki Yasuki, Ueno Tatsurō, and Hatayama Hideaki, published 1993. The publisher lists it as “out of stock, no reprint scheduled.” For the new translation, see Shinchōsha, 「永遠の虹――翻訳を終えて」 [The Eternal Rainbow: On Finishing the Translation]. The interview introduction states that seven years had passed since the translation began, and Satō Yoshiaki describes the actual amount of work as “a thousand days, ten thousand hours.”
9. The National Archives, “British Response to V1 and V2”. Explains that the V-2 flew at the speed of sound and “made no warning noise before impact.” On the development history of the V-2, see also NASA, Vanguard: A History.
10. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Concentration Camps, 1942–1945”. Documents that prisoners at Dora-Mittelbau were forced to manufacture V-weapons.
11. On the US side, see NASA, Vanguard: A History, which explains how captured V-2s and German rocket experts were brought to the United States after the war. On the Soviet side, see the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, “V-2 Missile”, which records the acquisition of documents and equipment at Peenemünde and Nordhausen, the use of German engineers, and the reconstruction of the V-2.
12. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Auschwitz”. Consulted on IG Farben’s synthetic rubber and fuel plant and forced labor at Auschwitz-Monowitz. On the formation of IG Farben and its relationship to the Nazi regime, see also “Bayer”.
13. The Federal Government of Germany, “Commemoration of the genocide of the Herero and Nama”. Consulted on the war of annihilation of 1904–1908, the camps, the roughly 100,000 victims, and the recognition as genocide. On forced labor, see the Deutsches Historisches Museum, “Herero-Krieg 1904” and “Unterspülter Bahndamm”.
14. Edward Mendelson, “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon,” MLN 91.6 (1976), pp. 1267–1275. Tom LeClair, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction, University of Illinois Press, 1989 (WorldCat record). Luc Herman & Petrus van Ewijk, “Gravity’s Encyclopedia Revisited: The Illusion of a Totalizing System in Gravity’s Rainbow,” English Studies 90.2 (2009), pp. 167–179. Used for an overview of the critical history concerning encyclopedism, systems, and totalization.
15. George Levine, “V-2,” Partisan Review 40.3 (1973). The online edition of the issue published by Boston University discusses the rocket’s parabola as “the shape of gravity’s rainbow itself.” Tony Tanner, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Thomas Pynchon, Methuen, 1982, pp. 74–95; see the Routledge catalog record and the eNotes reprint.
Translated from the Japanese original, “『重力の虹』とは？ なぜ「読めない」と言われるのか｜あらすじ・登場人物・難解な理由を解説”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.