Bending the parabola, breaking the circle: the idea of a cusp in Gravity's Rainbow.(Critical essay)

Pynchon Notes | March 22, 2003| | Copyright

Among the images from mathematics appearing throughout Gravity's Rainbow, two particular curves dominate. One, of course, is the titular parabola, which, as Steven Weisenburger points out, symbolizes "disease, dementia, and destruction" (10). The second is the circle. Weisenburger observes that "drinking games and dances move in circles; the Herero villages used to be arranged mandala-like; and in every episode are windmills, buttons, windows, eyes, Ferris wheels, roulette wheels, rocket insignia, and other cast-down indexes of the novel's grand cycling" (11); and "Gravity's ...

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