Gravity's Rainbow: Part IV

I don't know if the point of this next section was for the reader to conclude that Teddy Bloat is a hipster but here we are! Teddy Bloat is totally a hipster. The evidence is the long list of items he keeps in his fashionable kangaroohide messenger bag.

The other revelation is that Tyrone Slothrop is slovenly. I think that's why he's named the way he is and also Bloat is named the way he is because, um, he's a hipster? I'm not writing any sort of companion work to this book to help future readers so I don't need any supporting evidence for my conclusions.

In this section, Teddy Bloat has been tasked with taking clandestine pictures of a map on Slothrop's wall. The map is of London and is covered in stickers labeled with women's names. He's being paid by some organization to secretly gather this information. For the reader who is just 16 pages into Gravity's Rainbow, why he's doing it must remain a mystery. But for the super intelligent person who is reading Gravity's Rainbow for the third time (all at the same time: read a section once, probably reread it a second time, and then eventually reread it a third time when I get to it on my second reading which is being conducted at the same time as the first reading but with a lag of about 100 pages. I believe this is the proper way to read this book (three times!)), they understand exactly what this is about. It seems that Tyrone Slothrop's sexual conquests are all predictions of where a V2 will fall sometime in the next, on average, 4 1/2 days.

More will be learned about Tyrone's powers later when we learn that, as an infant, he was experimented on to see if he could be conditioned to get a little baby hardon due to outside non-penis stroking stimulus. The big mystery is what that stimulus was and why it might still be part of him and how maybe it's the reason he can somehow predict where the V2s will fall. And just like the V2s being portents of doom in reverse, where they bring the warning of death only after they've already exploded, so too Tyrone Slothrop somehow reacts to the falling of a V2 before it actually falls.

But I'm getting way, way ahead of myself! At least I didn't also begin discussing how Tyrone Slothrop is also being hypnotized to recall his past experiences so they can learn more about the behavoir of Black Americans (I don't think Tyrone is black himself based on his recalled experience where he climbs down a toilet to recover his harmonica) for their propaganda operation to send radio signals across the channel that are meant to heighten racial tensions with South African Germans.

Fucking Christ this book has some weird shit going on!