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 hand to bed humbly, generously, hilariously, into that final Humility which Enzian, the Herero-Nguarorerue, knows he is to be denied and envies deeply. As reward, they are spared Pynchon's satire and given his gaiety and tenderness and compassion. (p. 203)

Yet the "girls" have no representative among the major female characters of the novel. They really do serve as "moments"—the little life-flow that Slothrop first understands them to be. Numerous as...