Slothrop

[psmale at paradise.net.nz]

I don't know what's been suggested before, I'm new here myself. 

Because there are a lot of calculus metaphors in GR, to do with 
the parabolic motion of the rockets, I arrived at the theory that the 
war had formed a kind of coordinate space within which the 
function f(slothrop) finds the conditions of its possibility. Slothrop's 
link with the rocket via his "vital fluids" meant that he "came into 
his own" during the period when the rocket project was in full 
swing. There is something near the end of the book about Slothrop 
being not one but many; his substance is nothing but a series of 
infinitessimally thin slices, so that his coherent individual continuity 
is only perceptible from a particular vantage point which vanishes 
with the war. Whenever we see Slothrop, he is in a particular place 
at a particular time, in a particular sort of incarnation. In a similar 
way, the rocket in mid-flight, in an infinitessimally small time 
space, is motionless, yet carries with it a few telltale marks of the 
rest of its journey; eg. the double integral of the acceleration 
revealed by the position of the pendulum in a magnetic field yields 
the rocket's position on its flight path. At the other end of the 
journey, the whole thing explodes. Likewise, Slothrop fades into 
mediocrity, and there is nothing worthwhile to write about him any 
more except to say his cards reveal nothing outstanding in his life 
to come. Perhaps the curve of his trajectory became "chaotic" so 
that any 
straightforward 
analyses of the characteristics of its slope became impossible. 
While we're talking about Gravity's rainbow, I am wondering about 
the bit where Pirate and Katje dance in a big hotel lobby or 
something, and people are all "grimly flirtatious, and striving to be 
kind". What does it mean?

P