The epigraphs in *GR*

[Dave Monroe]

... no, not totally wrong, as even I've pointed out earlier, recall von Braun's
antipathy for hat nascent military-industrial (and one might add, -academic)
complex, which Pynchon certainly seems to share.  And von Braun was not a Nazi
ideologue, or so Michael Neufeld notes (The Rocket and the Reich).  Nonetheless,
he was involved in no small amount of nastiness, from the use of concentration
camp slave labor in the V-2 program to aiding and abetting the nuclear arms race
after the War.  One cannot dismiss the popular imagination, for starters, in
this regard, for while von Braun might well have been considered harmless,
heroic, even, enough by some--perhaps even aspiring physicist/engineer young Tom
Pynchon, as has been suggested--to host an hour or two of carefully staged
Disney television, he was also a contadictory and disturbing enough figure to be
cariactured as the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or
....   "Ambivalent," perhaps?  "Equivocal?"  "Betrayed," even, as one only can
be by another one admires?  Hm ...

Basileios Drolias wrote:

> i could be totally wrong on this, but after the nth reading of GR it somehow
> struck me that pynchon is somehow feeling sympathetic (ok maybe sympathetic
> is the wrong word but i am at work, and i cant think of a better one!)
> towards von Braun.
>
> and i somehow alwys felt that the first epigram is related to the
> dedication...
>
> regards
>
> basil