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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.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 1982. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-75).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1996. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 362-366).

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Thomas Pynchon has often been hailed, by those at wont to make such statements, as the most significant American author of the past half-century. What is indisputable about this simultaneously beguiling and frustrating, prodigiously sophisticated and irrevocably juvenile, not to say admired and reviled writer, is that his fiction has inspired critical readings that are now as appositely voluminous as his novels themselves. Yet no prior critical effort does full justice to the importance of the face in the work of this notoriously “faceless” author, who even had a brown paper bag over his head when depicted in cartoon form on The Simpsons. In light of this oversight, this thesis seeks to address what might be called—to borrow from his 1990 novel, Vineland—the ‘not-yet-come-to-terms-with face' in Pynchon's corpus. Though always driven by the workings of Pynchon's writing, various theorists—such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erving Goffman, and Emmanuel Levinas—are called-upon throughout this study in order to aid the conceptualisation of this ‘not-yet-come-to-terms with face'. Particular inspiration is taken from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's call to ‘dismantle the face' in A Thousand Plateaus. Albeit not in strict adherence to this summons, the first three chapters of this project butcher the face into its dominant component features: eyes, nose, and mouth. These features—as well as the central issues of the final two chapters, the mask and the face respectively—are then traced across Pynchon's entire oeuvre, including his most recent novel, Bleeding Edge, published when this project was already underway. What emerges is a picture of the integral role the face plays in Pynchon's manifold concerns: surveillance, surgery, dentistry, identity, cinema, drugs, the senses, and so on. This thesis ultimately contends that although frequently defaced and effaced in Pynchon's writing, the face is nevertheless a prime locus at which ethical and political possibility surface.

This thesis examines the countercultural politics expressed within the work of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, contributing to critical work already published on the subject of Pynchon's politics, in which there has been a recent upsurge of interest. Expressions of sympathy with anarchist and anti-Capitalist principles discerned in Pynchon's work are explored in their connection with the author's experience of particular practices and philosophies of the 1960s counterculture. Furthermore, the ongoing significance of sixties politics in Pynchon's more recent production is demonstrated as ideological connections between earlier and later novels are traced. In Slow Learner Pynchon professed admiration for the motive energy of Beat literature, so influential on the formation of the counterculture. With particular focus on Jack Kerouac's On the Road, chapter one demonstrates the impact of the Beat movement, and its limits, in Pynchon's early novels. New Left thought and tactics as manifested across the decade provide the focus of the second chapter, which engages primarily with Gravity's Rainbow's depiction of Communist revolutionaries in Weimar-era Germany. The following chapter considers the role of psychedelic experience and the philosophies of Timothy Leary in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Against the Day, arguing that the fantastical has a concrete political role in Pynchon's novels. Black Power, and specifically the political theory of the Black Panther Party, is the subject of chapter four. Gravity's Rainbow's framing of Huey P. Newton's concept of “revolutionary suicide” is central to an analysis which offers insights into the novel's perspectives on the use of violence and on leadership in revolutionary groups. The final chapter investigates the dynamics of Pynchon's ambivalent engagement with the Women's Movement. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is put forward as an important intertext for The Crying of Lot 49, while Vineland is examined in the context of radical feminism.

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Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 65).