Gravity's Rainbow

During the last weeks of 1944, Slothrop is in a lavish hotel near the beach. He has been sent to Monaco, an independent city state on the French Riviera. At this time, the Allied forces have pushed the Nazis out of France, but the casino is currently still named the Casino Hermann Goering. Slothrop has his own room, while Bloat and Tantivy must share a bedroom. The two Englishmen envy the American’s talent for attracting women, unlike the “rather reserved” Englishmen.

Tantivy shouts at “three pretty girls” (137) from the hotel balcony, but when the women invite the three men to a beach picnic, Tantivy is horrified that Slothrop chooses to wear a colorful Hawaiian shirt. On the beach, Bloat points out a woman who seems to be giving “the eye” to Slothrop; before he can approach her, an octopus attacks the woman and tries to drag her into the sea. Slothrop attacks the octopus and saves the woman, gaining the impression that the octopus is “not in good mental health” (140). Bloat tells Slothrop not to kill the octopus and hands him a crab to use to distract it. The woman is Katje Borgesius. Slothrop reflects on the attack. He doubts Katje was on the beach by accident, or that Bloat happened to have a useful crab available. He suspects that Bloat, Tantivy, and Katje are all involved in some kind of plot. Later, Katje holds Slothrop’s hand and suggests that perhaps their meeting was destined.

Later that evening, the octopus (revealed to be Pointsman’s trained octopus, Grigori) returns to Dr. Porkyevitch aboard a ship. Porkyevitch worries that Pointsman is conspiring against him. At the casino, Slothrop and his companions eat dinner with the three young women. Katje is beside him, and her “knee seems to be rubbing Slothrop’s” (143). Slothrop wants to speak to her, so he encourages the other diners to sing a loud song about Tantivy’s drinking habits. Katje whispers her room number to Slothrop while the men sing. After dinner, Slothrop wants to discuss the day’s events with Tantivy, who reluctantly agrees that the events seemed strange. He admits that Bloat has seemed strange for a few months and that he is “receiving messages in code” (144). However, he warns Slothrop against paranoia and offers whatever “help” he can.

Slothrop goes to Katje’s room. After they have sex, Slothrop begins to snore, and Katje “belts him in the head with a pillow” (148). Each time his snoring wakes her, she hits him with a pillow until a pillow fight ensues, in which Slothrop wonders “what other interesting props have They thought to plant” (148). The next morning, Slothrop is vaguely aware that someone is stealing his Army uniform. He leaps out of bed, and—wrapped in “a purple satin bedsheet” (149) as though it were a toga—he chases the thief but fails to catch them. Unbeknownst to Slothrop, Katje has arranged for his documents and clothing to be stolen—and when he returns to his hotel room, he finds it is “newly cleaned, perfectly empty” (151); all his possessions are gone. Bloat offers to lend Slothrop a British Army uniform until he can recover his clothes and his documents. Tantivy is now missing, and while Bloat seems unconcerned, Slothrop exits the hotel to search for him. He thinks about everything he has lost while “stumbling along in the rain” (154). That night, he returns to Katje’s hotel room.

Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck is installed as Slothrop’s new handler. He teaches Slothrop about the V2 rockets while Slothrop spends more of his time with Katje, despite his paranoia that she is deliberately seducing him for some unknown reason. He reasons that she is only doing “her job.” His fears escalate when he meets her in the casino one afternoon and her demeanor is cold and distant. She tells Slothrop how they once lived at the two separate ends of the rocket’s journey: She lived at the launch site and he lived in the target area, London. She likens the parabolic flight of the rocket between these locations to living “an entire life” (157). During this time, Slothrop misses Tantivy, “not just as an ally, but as a presence, a kindness” (157).

Slothrop notices how his study sessions with Dodson-Truck seem calculated to leave him sexually aroused before he meets Katje afterward—and Dodson-Truck is indeed secretly monitoring the nature and frequency of Slothrop’s “mysterious erections.” Because Slothrop is suspicious, he decides to finagle more information out of Dodson-Truck. One afternoon, Slothrop gets him drunk with a drinking game and invites him to the beach for a walk, and during their conversation, the inebriated man confesses to Slothrop: Dodson-Truck is “impotent”; the group referred to as “They” use his impotency to blackmail him; he and Katje watch Slothrop on Their orders, observing him “without passion.” With this discovery, Slothrop’s generalized paranoia seems incrementally confirmed.

At the White Visitation, Carroll Eventyr also learns about Them. He believes They are censoring the transcript recordings during his séances. In one transcript, Sasha discusses his death in Berlin in 1933; a police officer hit him on the head during a riot, and—“with [his] next to last pulsebeat” (165)—Sasha suddenly realized the beauty of the world.

The morning after the drunken walk on the beach, Dodson-Truck is no longer in the hotel. Katje accuses Slothrop of sabotaging “the whole thing” (166). After physically fighting, they have sex, followed by Katje quizzing Slothrop on rocket specifications. The following day, Katje refuses to explain why she seemed so strangely aloof in the casino a few days before. After one final night with one another, she is gone the next day. Slothrop’s behavior annoys the White Visitation researchers.

Pointsman, now dressed in a more expensive lab coat, remains “unruffled and strong” (170) and cools fears that their funding will be cut. Because he wants to secure his research funding, he has planned to keep his superior, Brigadier Ernest Pudding, in thrall: He has arranged for Katje to act as Pudding’s sexual dominatrix. That evening, Pudding visits the D Wing of the White Visitation as he has done every night for two weeks. There, Pointsman has organized an elaborate system of theatrically decorated cells that appeal directly to Pudding’s traumatic memories, eliciting his intense sadomasochistic sexual response. Pudding enters a cell belonging to a woman named Domina Nocturna (Katje in disguise), where he greets her formally, kisses her ring, and then takes off his clothes. As per Pointsman’s instructions, she hits Pudding with a cane, then urinates and defecates on him, forcing him to eat everything. The experience makes Pudding think about his horrific experiences on the battlefields of World War I, reminding him of “the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient” (177). When she tells him to do so, Pudding masturbates and then leaves, thinking about how the nightly visits to the cell are now his real home.

As winter turns into spring, Slothrop continues to learn about the V2 rockets. He talks to his new handler, Hilary Bounce, about the links between corporations who supply materials for both the Allies and Axis powers. Bounce works for Shell International Petroleum, and he is “a 110% company man” (180). When Slothrop studies the specifications of the V2 rockets, he also notices a number of strange anomalies regarding A4 and SG rockets. Unable to explain (but desperate to know) why these rockets have an insulation device and an insulation material named Imipolex G, Slothrop plans to sneak into Bounce’s hotel room and contact headquarters using Bounce’s teletype communication device. He arranges to have Bounce lured away to a party hosted by the “young madcap heir of the Limoges fireworks magnate” (183), then he enters Bounce’s room and sends the message to headquarters. After they respond (the reader will soon learn what they told Slothrop), Slothrop takes a taxi, planning to join the girl and Bounce at the party. As he departs, an unknown man in disguise follows him.

The party is hosted by Georges de la Perlimpinpin. Someone has drugged the food with hashish, and the party has become chaotic. Slothrop meets a notorious forger in a “white zoot suit with reet pleats and a long gold keychain” (184) named Blodgett Waxwing, who asks Slothrop to hold onto some money; he is performing a complicated deal involving money, drugs, and a tank, as well as a woman named Tamara and two other men. Slothrop agrees, but in exchange, he asks for a zoot suit of his own. Tamara arrives at the party by driving a Sherman tank into the house, whereupon she fires a dud projectile that kills no one. Slothrop helps Tamara from the tank, explaining to the grateful Waxwing that he recently saved a woman from an octopus. Waxwing seems to know this; he says that the incident with the tank really happened, while “that octopus didn’t” (186). Slothrop’s suspicions of conspiracy, yet again, seem vaguely confirmed. Waxwing wants to send him on an errand: He gives Slothrop the address of a man in the nearby French city of Nice, as well as the suit he promised to Slothrop.

When the headquarters responded to Slothrop (via Bounce’s teletype), Slothrop learned that Laszlo Jamf invented Imipolex G. In fact, Jamf is the central figure amid extensive connections between many pharmaceutical and chemical companies. At the casino, Slothrop studies the V2 specifications again. He sees a part labeled S-Gerät, 11/00000; he has never seen a serial number containing five consecutive zeros. While walking around the casino and thinking about the matter, he notices Tantivy’s obituary in a newspaper, written by the recently-promoted Major Bloat. Slothrop blames Them for killing Tantivy or possibly planting the story for Slothrop to find.

A spooked Slothrop flees from Monaco in a stolen car and drives to Nice, searching for the address given to him by Waxwing. The address belongs to a hotel. While staying in a room, Slothrop is haunted by drunken soldiers and ghosts from his past. The next morning, he meets a woman—one of Waxwing’s people—who gives him a new identity: the alias Ian Scuffling, a British war correspondent. She also gives Slothrop an address in Zurich and a good luck message from Waxwing. Slothrop travels to Zurich, where there is “never a clear sense of nationality anywhere, nor even of belligerent sides, only the War, a single damaged landscape” (193). Instead, the war has reconstructed “time and space in its own image” (193). Slothrop finds a hotel and then searches for Waxwing’s friend, a Russian man named Semyavin. Slothrop talks to Semyavin, who abhors the modern need for “information” (194); he believes that one day, all intelligence-gathering and spying will be handled by machines.

Later in a café, Slothrop is offered the psychedelic drug LSD by Mario Schweitar, a Swiss smuggler who claims to work for a chemical company. Slothrop refuses but quizzes Schweitar about chemicals, Laszlo Jamf, and Imipolex G. Schweitar claims that the latter is useless and a terrible burden on his company. Everyone at the company hates Jamf for inventing Imipolex G. Slothrop is surprised to learn from Schweitar that Jamf is dead, and, though he wants to buy more information from the smuggler, he lacks the money. He leaves, selling his white suit to buy a more inconspicuous outfit while feeling increasingly paranoid. He meets Franco Squalidozzi, a member of an Argentine anarchist group who believe there is a “limitless” potential for a different kind of world in the area of Germany known as the Zone. Squalidozzi hires Slothrop to take a message to Geneva. Slothrop delivers the message and returns to Zurich, but he cannot find Squalidozzi to deliver the response. Nevertheless, using the payment he earned from Squalidozzi for the errand, Slothrop pays for more of Schweitar’s information about Imipolex G and Jamf; when a strange messenger delivers the purchased information to Slothrop, he reads it, but it is “not as much as he wanted” (202), and he may soon wish he had not read any of it at all.

In May 1945, Pointsman, Mexico, Jessica, Katje, and an employee of the Shell Mex House chemical company meet at an English beachside resort. To save operational costs, Pointsman had planned to allow Slothrop to escape Monaco and then track him via intelligence agents—however, to Pointsman’s irritation, the agents have now lost track of him. Furthermore, his investigations into “a random sample of Slothropian sex adventures” (203) has returned with no information; the agents cannot verify the existence of the women whose locations are marked on Slothrop’s map. Losing Slothrop is bad because he knows “not only about the A4, but about what Great Britain knows about the A4” (205), the secret new rocket technology.

The narrative spins into a flurry that jumps between classic Hollywood films; an explanation of Murphy’s Law; the nature of the S-Gerät 11/00000; and Operation Black Wing’s attempts to manufacture race-based psychological propaganda for use in Germany. This latter effort involves recruiting an entire squadron of Black men (called the Schwarzkommando) to pose as German rocket scientists with Herero backgrounds. Pointsman begins to hear voices that tell him not to miss the opportunity to become “protagonist and antagonist in one” (209).