Gravity's Rainbow, A book about war?

[Doug Millison]

I  think the case can be made that GR is "about war" -- the American 
war in Vietnam, displaced onto GR's historical setting of WWII -- 
among a very many other things, but I'll save that for another day.

A bit dated, perhaps, but still a useful way to think about GR, for my money:

"_Gravity's Rainbow_  is an _encyclopedic narrative_, and its 
companions in this most exclusive of literary categories are Dante's 
_Commedia_, Rabelais's five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel, 
Cervantes's _Don Quixote_, Goete's _Faust_, Melville's _Moby Dick_, 
and Joyce's _Ulysses_. [...] Encyclopedic narratives attempt to 
render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, 
while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that 
culture shapes and interprets its knowledge. [...] All encyclopedic 
narratives include a full account of at least one technology or 
science. That is, they correlate the opposed worlds of aesthetic 
freedom (which is reflected in art) and natural necessity (which is 
reflected in science) far more elaborately than most other literary 
works. [...] Each encyclopedic narrative is an encyclopedia of 
literary styles, ranging from the most primitive and anonymous levels 
[...] to the most esoteric of high styles. [...]"
--"Gravity's Encyclopedia" by Edward Mendelson, in _Mindful 
Pleasures:  Essays on Thomas Pynchon" eds. Geroge Levine and David 
Leverenz. Little, Brown and Company. 1976.

Mendelson speaks of the Kirghiz interlude as GR's "ideological and 
thematic center" -- so the notion of looking for and finding a 
"center" in this novel isn't all that, well, novel.
-- 
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