As noted, Gravity's Rainbow's precedents include comic books, cartoons, and bad movies as well as literature, but it is a measure of the novel's greatness that the book it is most frequently compared with is James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), another landmark of twentieth century literature, because Pynchon's novel shares with Joyce's the quality of intricate detail, symbolic complexity, and philosophical profundity. The gloomy atmosphere and symbolic overlay of the novel have been compared to the works of T. S. Eliot. Critics also compare Pynchon's work to that of Herman Melville, particularly MobyDick (1851), since Slothrop's search for rocket 00000 resembles an ironic version of Ahab's quest for the white whale, and the many disguises Slothrop adopts are like those of the main character of Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857). Melville's sour philosophical position coupled with a volatile imagination also resemble that of Pynchon.