Liminality and Oven-Games in Gravity's Rainbow

[MalignD at aol.com]

<<"While the word 'Holocaust' appears metaphorically in a few haunting 
descriptive passages of urban landscapess, the Holocaust as an event is 
conspicuously--even radically--missing from a text so obessed with Western progress as a 
technology of death.   >>

Allowing the above snippet to stand in for what preceded it and what came 
after --

This seems to me right on point.  I've long felt that Pynchon stayed away 
from addressing the Holocaust directly for practical reasons -- that he (1) as a 
non-Jew, who was a child during the war, lacked the standing to go into it; 
and that, (2) if he did go into it, it would take over his novel.  

The latter reason was Joseph Heller's response to why the Holocaust was 
absent from Catch-22.

One can only dream about a Holocaust novel by Joseph Heller ...