Wandering Souls

As an encyclopedic and labyrinthine masterpiece with miscellaneous characters and motifs in the postmodernist American literature, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow presents an entropic and chaotic society in which the subjects are at the risk of degradation, loss of identity and heat death. Even worse, these subjects in the novel gradually dissipating to a shadow and a symbol in a chaos and absurd society in his creational world.Influenced by contemporary deconstructive literary theories represented by those of Jacque Derrida, Michal Foucault, Pynchon’s fiction is characterized by such postmodernist literary features as fragmented structure, complicated entanglement of plots, nonlinear narration, game of words, parody, pastiche, deconstruction of grand narratives and the sublime, but it is not merely a meaningless word of play. His fiction is intended to show his deep humanistic concern about the subjects in his literary world.The existing Pynchon criticism is mainly devoted to the philosophical, metaphysic, theoretical interpretation of such topics in Pynchon’s fiction as entropy, death, ambiguity, paranoia and its linguistic features, genre, narrative structure and narrative point of view, but not paying enough attention to Pynchon’s deep humanistic concern about the protagonists of the novels.The thesis makes a detailed analysis on the absurd dissipating phenomenon presented in the novel and focuses on going beyond Pynchon’s fantastic narratives for a detailed exploration’s profound meditation about the subjects in Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon’s fiction not only provides a reinterpretation of the literary story he creates, but also shows his deep humanistic concern about Western society. What he endeavors to do is to provide an all-side realistic view of Western society.Pynchon’s fiction portrays deconstructively a realistic picture of modern and contemporary Western world via fantastic narratives, not only elaborating upon such realistic problems as history, scientific and technological development, ethics, religion and culture which are of critical importance for the existence and development of human society, but also showing his deep humanistic concern about postmodernist Western intellectuals’ philosophical and theoretical re-examination of these problems. In the process of painting such a realistic world, Pynchon refuses to judge, but faithfully presents whatever comes into his grasp. He never participates in the interpretation of his literary texts, remaining stubbornly, however, in the middle ground watching his texts, his characters and his readers stage endlessly their play. This is what is canonical about Thomas Pynchon, and this is the inexhaustible fountain of life of his fiction.