There are hundreds of characters in Gravity's Rainbow, but most of the action of the novel revolves around the adventures of two main characters, American Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop and German Major Weissmann, also known as Blicero, a German nickname for death. The paths of the two characters move towards each other as Weissmann builds rocket 00000 and Slothrop tries to find its meaning and location.

Tyrone Slothrop is a New Englander with Puritan forebears (characteristics he shares with Pynchon) who comes to the attention of workers at the White Visitation, a British spy center in London during World War II, because the locations of his sexual conquests coincide with the later arrival of a V-2 rocket. His superiors, particularly Major Pointsman, want to discover if Slothrop has some psychic control over the rockets. Much later the reader learns that Slothrop, while an infant, was the subject of an experiment...