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This paper is an investigation into the way that paranoia is represented in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. Using various definitions of paranoia which are given in the text itself, I outline how each definition is demonstrated, both in narrative events and in the structural principles of the text. As well, I show how each definition may lend a different perspective on the reading process itself, thus implicating the Pynchon's reader in the paranoid dynamic which Gravity's Rainbow depicts. In effect, I attempt to return the pluralism to Pynchon's definition of paranoia.

This study of Gravity's Rainbow replies to critics who have misread Thomas Pynchon's novel, and defines the novel's focal concept. In Gravity's Rainbow, style, structure, and concept are integrated in the author’s design. The fulfillment of this design results in a comprehensive representation of the apocalyptic temper of western civilization in the modern period—the consciousness that has caused the armageddon of World War II and the threat of nuclear war. A meaningful term for this apocalypse is “parousia”, an end to history taking the form of a general surrender to deathliness. A beneficial way of defining “parousia” is through a certain ideological social stratification. Characters in the novel can be categorized as the Elect, the Preterite, or the Redeemer. Ethical struggles between these classes result in an on-going historical process toward an apocalypse.This paper organizes Pynchon’s apocalyptic concept into a centrifugal axis where meaning is organically interrelated and then spirals outward toward varied novelistic developments which offer other perspectives on the same basic concepts. The thesis explicates approximately thirty episodes which substantiate the “parousia” concept as it appears in the author’s style, structure, and thematic ideology.

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For close to a decade, I have weighed comparative approaches to "the Great American Novel". Progress increased as soon as I resolved on selecting Moby-Dick as the work originally responsible for issuing that slogan. Making this particular selection required the application of a dynamic concept which, appropriately, reflects critiques of knowledge production: "the Archive". Perhaps the most direct references to a conceptual archive appear in Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, which addresses the dual forces "preservation/destruction" that influence allegory and mythology. Other critical writers refer to a similar concept through various other terms, ultimately equipping my thesis with a method for studying the relation between myth and allegory. The method draws from each writer's focus on the form and content dynamics of artifacts, and how these dynamics reflect the historical conditions that affirm or produce them. Specifically, all the writers I have selected to study, in some way consider the play between the mechanical apparatus and the representation it produces. Thus, I concluded that my literary comparative approach could involve juxtaposing a different, historically concurrent mode of documentation: film media and photography. Gravity's Rainbow is often considered, after Moby-Dick, the most universally-recognized "Great American Novel". Pynchon spends a lot of time referring to mass-produced films, their effects on the global order emerging with WWII, and to the material occurrence of film technology as it relates to the book as a material artifact. For Pynchon, the backlots built up by such "great" as D.W. Griffith constitute the twentieth-century frontier. / Master of Arts

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(EN) The present MA thesis focuses on the function of paranoia found in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon's novel is routinely considered one of the finest pieces of American fiction to emerge after World War II and no discussion of this book can avoid the topic of paranoia. Its usage dates back to the time of Hippocrates and, after centuries of addition, the term paranoia is no longer confined to the medical community. After entering popular usage there is no consensus as to how this term is defined. It now possesses a sort of freedom that Pynchon routinely exploits. Paranoia resists isolation in this text. The specific approach to understanding its function is dependent on three parts. First, the reader must identify the countless forms of paranoia spread throughout Gravity's Rainbow. Next, one must understand why a specific example from the novel represents a form of paranoia in Pynchon's fictional world. Finally, the reader must recognize why an isolated form of paranoia is present and what Pynchon hopes to achieve through its presentation. The paranoia found in Gravity's Rainbow has no fixed meaning. This is a conscious decision on the part of Pynchon and its central goal is to destabilize the entire narrative, which is a central part of paranoia's immense power regularly employed....

This thesis uses the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983, trans. 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985, trans. 1989) as a methodology for examining the subject of film in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973). The first half of the thesis provides a review of the literature on the subject of film in Gravity's Rainbow, as well as a review of current scholarship on Deleuze's Cinema books, before providing a close reading of both Cinema books that summarizes and explicates the elaborate taxonomy of cinematic signs and images developed by Deleuze. The second half of the thesis uses Deleuze's cinematic taxonomy to analyze examples of time-images and movement-images in Gravity's Rainbow. The thesis concludes by connecting the work of Pynchon's novel to the work of Deleuze's study in a discussion of how film participates in the emergence of a new concept of history during the postwar period.

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