| From the initial dissolution of the nighttime Evacuation scene to the inexplicable "scattering" of its hero, Tyrone Slothrop, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow continually liberates its text in an attempt to create an open "Zone" of interpretive possibilities. As the reader moves through the text of Pynchon's novel, he or she must repeatedly reconsider as illusion characters, events, and worlds which previously seemed concrete. Faced with such narrative flux and mobility, the reader learns to operate in a constant state of transition, leaving behind one interpretation for the next in a seemingly endless series of reversals. This adaptation to transitory experience becomes both the form and the meaning of Gravity's Rainbow, a highly self-conscious and consummately postmodern novel which helps its reader to rediscover the crucial role which he or she plays in the creation of the text. |
