چکیده:
Gravity''s Rainbow is among the “most widely celebrated، unread novels” of American literature and already “a piece of minor folklore.” Pynchon''s genius manifests itself in his uniquely wide range of subject matter and literary techniques of presentation، narration، and interpretation. Gravity''s Rainbow is a novel based on various sets of parallels، oppositions and double structures. These parallel patterns are abundant both in the structure of the novel، and in the content، characterization، and themes. In this paper two of these binaries، paranoia and anti-paranoia، are discussed to show how Pynchon enjoys involving his characters and his readers in a cosmos in which no absolute truth and no singular concept can survive on its own; a universe in which certainty is a luxury that no one can reach.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Introduction Thomas Pynchon (1937-) wrote Gravity's Rainbow in 1973 creating a novel which according to Moore (1987: 1) is among the "most widely celebrated, unread novels" of American literature and already "a piece of minor folklore.
C. Dougherty (1995), in discussing paranoia as a focal metaphor in Stanley Elkin, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon, states, For these writers paranoia is an especially effective metaphor for their characters' sense of powerlessness and for the consequent notion that in an apparently random universe one way individual human beings can assert their own meaning or significance is to identify a nemesis, thereby justifying the assumptions that one's life seems to be a "plot" and that whatever happens is the result of a definable cause.
Pynchon himself portrays the universe of Gravity's Rainbow as a "reified paranoia" in which all characters are victims of "improbable, but quite real" (Moore, 1987: 64) schemes that govern the whole life.
(Gravity’s Rainbow 506) To the surprise of the readers, Pynchon does not so much approve of anti-paranoia, the state in which nothing is in connection to other things.
What leads to both Slothrop's anti-paranoia and that of other characters and also the readers' strong disillusion is rooted in what the "world renowned analyst Mickey Wuxtry – Wuxtry" (Gravity’s Rainbow 861) tells us and thus discredits all our presuppositions: There never was a Dr. Jamf .
Pynchon: Creative paranoia in gravity's rainbow.