V2 Rocket Death as a Banana

[J K Van Nort]

The section begins and ends with two visions of death and very human responses: the rocket as ballistic with its randomness and the adenoid blob, consuming everything in its path. The two fantasies can also be seen on Pynchon’s religious terms for class lines with the Preterite responding to the randomness of their odds of surviving and the Elect attempting to negotiate and neutralize the adenoid death of total war and sending surrogates to face what they hope to escape. As he prepares the banana breakfast, Pirate confers with Teddy Bloat about the V2 rocket, considering the odds of their survival. The rocket was lost to radar over the channel. ‘God had plucked it for him, out of the airless sky, like a steel banana’. He’s dodged this bullet, but how many more? Which one is ‘just as likely to land on top of him’ as any of them. Pynchon describes breakfast smells pervading the house/maisonette as life-giving and a renunciation, temporarily, of death. Can life, the joy of life protect against the rain/reign of war & death?  The bananas grow from Pirate’s despair. We have Pirate, the fantasy-surrogate, creating a breakfast banquet that fantasizes eating the random death of the V-2 represented by bananas. The ‘steel banana’ is plucked by god, and the world-weary crew around Pirate banquet on bananas, dining on death. This is similar to the scene in the movie The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, Her Lover, when the wife, played by Helen Mirren, asks the chef how he decides to charge for his dishes. He replies that he charges more for anything black, because people associate black with death. They want to eat death, to say ‘look I am eating death’. Similarly the crew treats the bananas as death in the form of food. These men at the banana breakfast represent the majority of people facing death in a war. They represent the Preterite, pawns of ‘The Firm’ and the anonymous voices dictating world events by playing the “Great Game”.