Preview of Gravity's Rainbow Summary:

All of the themes of Pynchon's stories and first two novels reappear and are elaborated upon in Gravity's Rainbow. The rapid, mindless depletion of the earth's resources, hastening the process of entropy, is what the war was about, rather than ideology or morality. The war ended certain governments and eliminated certain leaders, but entropic decay goes on. Pynchon steps outside the framework of the war at one point to assert directly that living in the last half of the twentieth century (being a part of what Pynchon calls "The System") is like being a passenger on a bus (consuming petrochemicals, of course) driven by a madman bent on self-annihilation and thereby the destruction of those who ride with him. The most frightening part of this simile is that one is only a passenger on the bus; the individual is powerless to stop the destruction even if he or...