Narrative Form and Technological Fact in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon

FAIN: FT-13348-77

Khachig Tololyan
Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT 06459-3208)

To study Thomas Pynchon's transformation of the history of the V-2 rocket into a narrative. His Gravity's Rainbow cannibalizes historical and technological information and turns process into narrative, fact into symbol. PI asks why a writer might choose to use material so resistant to the shaping power of the imagination, and to consider what advantages result from Pynchon's use of such difficult material.