The Qualified Optimism of Gravity's Rainbow

Abstract

<p>Gravity's Rainbow is both an historical document that captures the Zeitgeist of the 1960s through allusions to the theoretical writings of such popular philosophers as Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, and a justification of the questioning spirit that motivated those writers. Pynchon uses their ideas along with many aspects of scientific theory to present a dark world which is essentially the negative of their optimism. The result, however, is not pessimism, but optimism qualified by the reality that necessitates it.</p>