| As an encyclopedia-like or labyrinthine masterpiece with miscellaneous characters and motifs in the postmodernist American literature, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow presents an entropic and chaotic war society at the risk of degradation, loss of identity and heat death.Based on the critical theory of deconstruction, particularly decenterment of logocentrisme and decenterment of metaphysics of presence, this thesis conducts a qualitative research on the paradoxical relationship between technical rationality and value rationality by means of analyzing such embedded polarities as causality, performativity, nature vs. human, control vs. freedom, eroticism vs. love, etc. Eventually, what the novel intends to reveal is that the mankind cannot keep a privileged strata over nature for good because the hegemony of technology used as a tool to conquer nature brings us more a destructive randomness than much social progress, so it is the only way out to live in the fatal limitation against universal omniscience that human beings cannot but balance technical rationality and value rationality by means of retrieving equality, freedom, innocence and love, as Pynchon shows that truth exists"between-Zero-and-One".Pynchon's obsession with technology, morals and truth not only establishes him as one of the international greatest novelist but also throw reflective apocalypse for modern society controlled by profit-oriented desire whereas confronted with moral decline. This thesis aims to uncover Pynchon's philosophy of truth and life while exploring how the idea of decenterment of technical rationality actively influences human existential dilemma and recalling for establishment of value rationality in the capitalist society. Moreover, it is expected to enhance the academic research on Gravity's Rainbow from the perspective of postmodernist decenterment and contribute to the construction of postmodernist literary criticism. |
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