// War Literature

I’m going to come right out and say it- after reading over a hundred pages of Gravity’s Rainbow, I’m still just as lost as those who blogged before me. I found myself in utter frustration trying to understand how each part is related. In the back of my head, I assumed that if I keep reading all the pieces will fall together and I will finally see the bigger picture Pynchon is trying to convey…but sadly this never happened. As I was reading this book, I felt like I was watching some horrible movie with tons of irrelevant and incoherent scenes.

So instead of attempting to explain the story as a whole, I will simply look into a brief segment that caught my attention. At one point in the text, when Pirate is talking to Katje, he tells her of ancestor Frans Von der Groov and how he dedicated thirteen years of his life in Mauritius killing dodo birds. On one hand, Groov hates these birds “for reasons he could not explain,” but on the other hand, when he is staring at the dodo’s egg, he sees “how the weapon made an axis potent as Earth’s own between himself and this victim, still one, inside the egg, with the ancestral chain, not to be broken out for more than its blink of world’s light” (109). Here, Groov presents the first kind of connection between man and dodo bird; the connection created by his hookgun.

Groov then goes on to talk about the “Conversion of the Dodos” and describes the scene when all the dodos gathered to be sanctified and says that “For as much as they are the creatures of God, and have the gift of rational discourse, acknowledging that only in his Word is eternal life to be found…” (111). After this, he talks about a new connection between man and the dodo bird; the connection created upon the fact that they are all now brothers in Christ.

So why does Pynchon present these two connections to us? What does the dodo bird represent? And finally, how is this relevant to the plot of Gravity’s Rainbow?