Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” has spent the vast majority of its publication perplexing the minds of its readers by challenging their attention through the Chaotic meanderings of Tyrone Slothrop and a plethora of other bemusing characters. Many Critics have rewarded Pynchon’s extensive work by praising his novel to be revolutionary, or as Richard Locke of The New York Times claimed “bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical, poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached and blasted” (New York Times, 1973).
Roger and Jessica’s romantic relationship serves as a survival mechanism, or reflex, produced by the chaos that is war. Their relationship contrasts greatly with the relationships pursued by Slothrop and the many women who become objects of Slothrop’s unconscious impulse and desire to cope with the war through the act of sexual fulfillment. These two contrasting sets of…show more content… The first time they are introduced, Roger and Jessica are driving together, avoiding their surroundings in a very premeditated, conscious manor as they pass by a the wreckage of a building caught on fire (most likely due to the explosion of a missile). In the beginning years of the war, both characters might have stopped in order to assist the policemen and firemen in saving any persons who were trapped beneath the wreckage, but the narrator claims that after be subjected to such occurrences year after year during the war, both Roger and Jessica see their assistance as futile, due to the regularity of missile contact and subsequently the inevitable death of those in the line of
