In the following essay, Strehle sees Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as a novel that renders a non-Newtonian world full of discontinuity, instability, and quantum unpredictability.

In the following essay, Wolfley examines the thematic structure of Gravity's Rainbow.

In the following essay, McHugh examines Pynchon's construction of white male identity in Gravity's Rainbow.

In the following essay, McHale investigates received Modernist reading strategies exploited by Gravity's Rainbow.

In the following essay, Black discusses the ways in which Gravity's Rainbow revivifies the Romantic conception of the relationship between the physical force of gravity and the ethical problems of humanity's Fall and sinful nature.

In the following essay, Baker considers Gravity's Rainbow by situating the text within the dual contexts of 1960s American radicalism and 1940s German imperialism.

In the following essay, Muste examines the symbolic implications of the mandala in Gravity's Rainbow, illuminating the novel's thematic structure that reflects both the unity and division of the mandala's four segments.

In the following essay, Tanner demonstrates how Gravity's Rainbow subverts the traditional methods of reading, suggesting that this strategy renders conventional attempts to interpret the text ineffective.

In the following essay, Hume correlates a perspectival rocket subtext—either a view from above or a view from below—to the organization of Gravity's Rainbow in terms of philosophical questions, technical issues, and the relationship between reader and text.

In the following essay, Olsen examines elements of postmodern fantasy in Gravity's Rainbow.

In the following essay, Hume considers mythographic, modernist, and postmodern aspects of Pynchon's characters in Gravity's Rainbow. According to Hume, the novel's major characters are subjected to a common set of situations and relationships that reveal Pynchon's underlying humanism.

In the following essay, Hume explores the intersection of science fiction, fantasy, and mythology in Gravity's Rainbow.

Gravity's Rainbow is an extraordinary web of links among characters and actions, doubles, role-playing and role-reversing. Images of coordinating systems, parallel ideals, cross it at every point and at every level of theme and plot. (p. 201) [The pretty young things of Gravity's Rainbow] nurture life, offer a moment of warmth, light, safety, truth, wherever we find them. Preterites, given bottom billing on the program, they offer what they can and what they have, passing Slothrop along from h...

In its use of a symbolic and psychic geography, Gravity's Rainbow recalls romantic novels in which a region of adventure and magical possibility exists apart from ordinary, civilized "reality."… Thomas Pynchon invokes [a] long tradition of symbolic and psychic geography in his epigraph to Part 3 ("In the Zone") of Gravity's Rainbow with a characteristic allusion to popular culture: "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore…....

In the following essay, Turier identifies the artistic and scientific sources of the octopus Grigori's attack on Katje in Gravity's Rainbow.

Gravity's Rainbow has taken science/speculative fiction beyond the genre's limits into metaphysics, metapsychology, and cosmology. Pynchon has accomplished this by questing at the innermost nature of homo sapiens and in so doing has called into serious question some of the basic and sanguine assumptions upon which contemporary notions of science fiction are founded. First of all, Pynchon, in the Freudian tradition, is concerned with the dualism that is reflected in the designation of the speci...