Puzzling out the epistemology, or the contemporary use-value, of Gravity's Rainbow

There's no reason to reify this novel, obviously, and Molly Hite is right to historicize it as a function of certain countercultural discourses and energies. But I'm certain that Pynchon has seized something about the shift into late capitalism, and the bewildering transnational Network Societies that it breeds. In Slothrop, I will argue, he captures a consciousness torn between paranoid certainty and a disorienting embrace of multitude, the white male last subject cast into the whirlwind of flow.

Slothrop’s whole existence under the They-system is one of jarring realizations, followed by drifts into uneasy ... what I'll call for lack of a better term disknowledge, or disparanoia, the epistemological black holes which rive the Zone, the Zone itself being a jumble disknowledge/knowledge, the organization of the War Machine and the disorganization of its collapse. (In Lines of Flight, Stefan Mattesich terms this duality "drift" and "submission" (2)). “What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moiré, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences… “’Want me here’? What for?” (395). This dim slide of meaningless into meaning, disorientation into orientation, characterizes the shifting flows of rigid Cold War nostalgias juxtaposed with vertiginous overflows, sublime aggregations of disarrayed facts, which characterize life in the Risk Society or Information Society. All anchored, in Slothrop’s case, by the ultimate nostalgia, the one that works at you before you were born: gender.