Alright, I actually did it. I actually finished this. It was difficult, but I really enjoyed it...

Alright, I actually did it. I actually finished this. It was difficult, but I really enjoyed it. The only question I have is, what exactly happened? Like in the whole book? I honestly feel so lost still. So many vignettes...

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Somewhat related, did all that pedophilia even happen? Was Slothrop just fucking crazy and made it all up?

Were the bananas important?!

>what exactly happened
a guy named Tom sat down in the 70's on acid and wrote a book

Should I have read it on acid then?

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yes, if you do not understand the bananas you have no hope of understanding GR

yikes

>OMG I LOVE HARRY POTTER!!!!!!!!

There’s a whole interweaving or themes, symbols, and imagery which ties into the plot in a complex way (from one point of view) but also in a very simple, straight-in-your-face way. This sounds paradoxical. The thing about Pynchon is that on a sentence-to-sentence, scene-to-scene level, he can be very dense. However, he’s pretty in-your-face about his themes and symbols if you can understand the story. What he’s doing is combining the ideas of sadomasochism, duality, entropy, and Pavlovian conditioning in a way such that it runs throughout the whole story and is a commentary on the modern human condition, on pollution, and on war. In Pavlovian conditioning, as Pynchon points out, there’s an “ultra-paradoxical phase” where a negative stimulus can result in a positive response and vice versus. The union of opposites, basically. This is related explicitly by Pynchon to occult traditions (the Kabbalistic Tree of Life of Jewish mysticism, for instance, where there are two pillars representing Mercy and Severity; yin and yang; the Masonic checkerboard of black and white representing the union of opposites) where opposites are combined. Cf. also Jung’s idea of the union of opposites as a psychological archetype running through the world’s religious and mystical systems. Pynchon also relates this to transvestism (two genders combined) and sadomasochism (pain and pleasure combined). One poster a long time ago also made a great post pointing out how Pynchon constantly and subtly juxtaposes the colors black and white throughout the book.

Entropy, the state of randomness, lack of order. This is crucial to the book. The book sort of leads you on with a bunch of vignettes and subplots and conspiracy theories, making you think they’ll be tied together in the end. Instead, in Part 4, everything sort of disintegrates, becomes a surrealistic haze. This is almost, if not outright, metafictional: it could represent the rocket 00000 exploding at the end, causing a state of chaos in its explosion represented by the fragmented state of the end of the book. This ties in to war: humans willingly destroying themselves (Thanatos, Freudian death drive, sadomasochism again), increasing entropy. This is a brief overview, there’s more complicated analyses possible, but overall Pynchon’s symbolism and themes are pretty clear. It’s understanding what literally happens in the book that’s the issue at times. Once you get that, the symbolism is clear.