Rocket-structure, the pattern and death of all myth.1

[Terrance]

Roger and Jessica take children to
see a pantomime of Hansel and Gretel. The rocket crashes
near the theater, the parabola connecting these two
relationships to the pattern of a fairy tale on both sides
of the rocket's trajectory. 
Blicero's perverse rituals do not preserve anyone from war. 
 His violent sex is a part of the War, not a preservation
against it. The fairy
tale as usually told stresses the preservation of the
children form the hostile intent of the witch. 
In GR, the stress is placed on the death romance of
submitting to the oven, the Nazi monument to murder. 
Under the "present dispensation" the freedom of life is 
thwarted by ritual conditioning to death:  

"...mothers and fathers are conditioned
into deliberately dying in certain
preferred ways: giving themselves
cancer and heart attacks...going
off to fight in the war--leaving their
children alone in the forest. " 


This is the one way trip of no return, the rule of war
asserting that "people are meant for work and government,
for austerity", as Roger, who certainly read his Weber,
claims. 

The submission of individuals to the demands of war
creates a situation in which the cycle of life is broken
and, Atropos,  "she who cannot be turned governs the aspect
of action." 

Eddie Pensiero  possessed by the rule of Atropos,
does not simply give haircuts, but performs them with the
attention to detail that Slothrop exhibits in his generating
Black-words and his later fascination with trees. Of course
Slothrop's fascination with trees does not bring him to an
understanding of the role of the Tree of Creation as
archetype and legitimizing pattern for action. Though aware
of the individual integrity of each tree, Slothrop is too
far gone to be able to associate this realization with the
rest of his experience and re-integrate himself. 

Religion or Myth and the relation of myth to deity are
important in the  book for two reasons. First, it is the
concurrent use and
denial of the viability of myth that is one cause of the
violence in the book, and in history. 

Second, the sense of deity in the book is
more "absentee " than the war that carries that epithet: 
Patterns would appear to be the only
expression of order. The denial of myth is the concomitant
of the stress placed on abstraction and mechanical
explanations for human existence and actions. The
dissociation of thinking and feeling that may be associated
with this bias can lead to war which forces Man into the
mythic style of life in its most destructive form. 

This view of the effect of the denial of the power of myth
is related to the cultural
denial of Death that is a central theme we have discussed at
length--Brown etc..