History and Fiction: the Narrative Voices of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

Abstract

This essay highlights the fact that any reading or teaching of Gravity's Rainbow proceeds from a secure sense of Pynchon's aesthetic relation to history. Based on the argument that Gravity's Rainbow is an historical novel, this essay shows how Pynchon in this novel stages the conflict between elect and preterit, between nature and technology, between historical human agency and grace by embedding its themes within the specificity in Central Europe at the end of World War II.