Abstract: This essay reads Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as a work of Holocaust fiction. While Pynchon refers to the Holocaust and other historical atrocities indirectly throughout the novel, he generally favors techniques of partial omission and oblique presentation. This approach aligns Pynchon with one of the dominant textual strategies of atrocity fiction in general, and of Holocaust fiction in particular. It also allows Pynchon to consider the events of the Holocaust in ways that resonate with two major tendencies in Holocaust historiography: its status as a product of modernity, and its relationship to a longer history of colonial genocide.
Eric Sandberg (Mon,) studied this question.