Gravity's Rainbow is a prime example of postmodernism, a literary viewpoint which arose in response to the horrors of World War II such as the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Postmodernist writers maintain that the old rules for the writing and understanding of literature can no longer be used in the face of such disasters and that traditional ideas about plot, character, and meaning must be swept away in order to face a new age of uncertainty. The prior literary movement, modernism, represented by such authors as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, which asserted that escape from industrial society into a world of art was possible, is a particular target of the postmodernists.

Much of the critical discussion of Gravity's Rainbow is related to postmodernist philosophy.

1. Find a more complete discussion of postmodernism in a literary dictionary. Identify the elements of postmodernism in Gravity's Rainbow...