Gravity's Rainbow: Part III

In the second section, we get to know a little bit more about Captain Geoffrey "Pirate" Prentice. I don't know if he's the hero or just the first character that gets the spotlight. He's Gravity's Rainbow's Catch-22's Yossarian. He's sort of stuck doing the job higher ups demand from him while he constantly worries about his death. Except he's The X-Files version of Yossarian. Yossarian didn't have any magic powers. He wasn't special at all. That was kind of the point both with his predicament and his senior officers' attitude toward his possible death. But Pirate has a super power: he can invade, take-over, and manage other people's fantasies. And once the military discovered he had this power, he was roped into using it for their benefit.

You're probably wondering, "What? Fuck you. That is not a thing in this book." Don't worry! I'm not upset that you're cussing at me in my imagination. But think about it! Mason & Dixon was 1/3 historical novel, 1/3 paranormal strangeness, and 1/3 Mason's boner. It totally makes sense.

This is the section I most remember from my previous attempts at reading the book because it's the section that talks about all of the different meals Pirate makes from bananas. Cultivating bananas and making food with them for his colleagues is sort of the thing he does to destress from living other people's fantasies. The last fantasy he had to manage for a number of years was where he attempted diplomatic relations with a gigantic and sentient adenoid that was destroying London. It was the fantasy of some guy who needed to be busy with some other shit in the Middle East but he was too busy dealing with his dream adenoid. So Pirate took over so the other guy could do his job. And then once the guy did his job and saved the world (but, as noted in the book, not from World War II. He saved it from some other historical problem that I couldn't be bothered to read more about at the local library), he was found dead in a bathtub full of custard. So I guess that's how the Paranormal Military retires the weird people they don't need anymore.

I guess Pirate's nickname "Pirate" is because he commandeers other people's fantasies?

Some other characters are mentioned but I don't know enough about them to know if what we learned was important. Like some guy named Bloat and some other guys named other things. There are a lot of characters!

It wasn't until this reading that I realized how much this book is about the weird, paranormal offshoot experiments of World War II. Maybe they were all real. Maybe they're just hyperbolic representations of the militaries experiments with ESP and Astral Projection and Mind Control. Does it matter? Probably to Pynchon! But not to a dumb casual reader like me! If I can't explain why Clifford the Big Red Dog was so fucking massive, why would I think I could explain any plot points in a Thomas Pynchon novel?! I know my fucking limits!