Such pessimistic readings of the sexual politics at work in Gravity's Rainbow are typified by Herman and Weisenburger's recent argument that Pynchon's "liberated narrative techniques" ultimately fail to "connect to a politics, a practice, capable of addressing the alienated individualism, the thwarted prospects of nurturing and community, and the
deathward trajectory of all the plots Gravity's Rainbow otherwise represents.
Through that lens, the Midwestern colonists are less harbingers of rewilding than doomed mariners sailing
deathward through a hostile sea of civilization.
But at other times the poems more distinctly imagined their maker's real vanishing, the
deathward drag to which we are all subject, and to these scenes Mark brought a combination of classical amplitude, wit, stoicism, and elegance that was all his own.
3.3) In Royal Palm: he meditates on man's direction in life, ever towards death: "[...] till our
deathward breath is sealed -."
This
deathward drift of the philosophy is something neither Mailer nor Brossard failed to see, though while the one put it in his books, the other sensed it in their author.
When the capricious gods are calling
deathward, like Hector, we must each stand alone.
Doesn't Jesus' death release us all from the downward,
deathward spiral of violence Doesn't his resurrection show us that it is God's way to give life and to make things new
Second, the narrative ends in a murder scene, because "All plots tend to move
deathward" in crime fiction (26).
All
deathward everything moves, ineluctably, irreversibly.