Repetition and the Construction of Character in Gravity’s Rainbow

[Henry Musikar]

Gravity’s Rainbow — Issues of Character
March 13, 2009 at 6:35 am (Critical Writing, Prose, Reading) 

Hume, Kathryn. “Repetition and the Construction of Character in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 33.4 (1992): 243-254. MLA International Bibliography. Ames Lib. 12 Mar 2009 .

     I initially decided to look at this article on Gravity’s Rainbow because its title suggested a look at something I had not yet considered in regards to the novel; namely, how Pynchon constructs his characters and what effects that has on the work. Of course, I felt ever encouraged to read it because it began with a reference to Joyce. Hume’s initial observation is in fact that unlike Joyce, whose characters’ struggle we can observe through the psychological portraits he constructs, Pynchon does not ground the struggle of his characters in the psyche of the individual. Hume then presents what she considers to be the two popular explanations for this: 1) as a result of the book being a satire or 2) as a way of invoking postmodernism. I am not convinced by these premises, which could make it awful difficult for the article to prove anything to me. Just because Pynchon paints the psyche differently than Joyce and often uses it as a source of enigma does not mean that that internal struggle is absent or even unrepresented. Also, I don’t think that the book is so preoccupied with being a satire or invoking postmodernism that it directly constructs flat characters. I would hesitate to call many of the characters flat, anyway. Slothrop I certainly think of as dynamic. And any simplifications that appear to exist I think play to the theme of people that are controlled. They only seem flat because they are constantly under a state of being controlled and are forced into situations where the freedom to be a dynamic human being is denied them—they are reduced to conditioned cogs in the machine that is the system represented in the novel. However, it would be unfair to simply abandon the article so early, before it really even gets to utter its initial analyses of these premises. And of course Hume doesn’t disappoint, responding to these “popular” explanations with the following: “I would like to focus on material that their assumptions necessarily obscure for them and their readers” (243).
http://hereshebe.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/gravitys-rainbow-issues-of-character/ 

Henry Mu 
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