In its use of a symbolic and psychic geography, Gravity's Rainbow recalls romantic novels in which a region of adventure and magical possibility exists apart from ordinary, civilized "reality."… Thomas Pynchon invokes [a] long tradition of symbolic and psychic geography in his epigraph to Part 3 ("In the Zone") of Gravity's Rainbow with a characteristic allusion to popular culture: "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore….—Dorothy, arriving in Oz." (p. 225)

Pynchon's psychic wilderness, the Zone, is a place of purgation the fires of which can transform being into something new and magical, not merely "real," but legendary. (p. 226)

The analogue of Kansas in Gravity's Rainbow is London in the winter of 1944 as the close of World War II approaches, the setting of Part 1. London is the central base of the Allied bureaucracy, "where all the paperwork's done, the contracts signed, the days numbered."… There, people are intricately organized under various acronyms according to a power structure, leaving the individual highly visible and vulnerable, but innocently trying to make the best of it…. Tyrone Slothrop can be scrutinized and manipulated with absolute certainty in London because there is a power structure there capable of putting him in a fishbowl, and because he has a very specific history in time and space—he is, in fact, a footnote to the history of science, as the subject in his infancy of an unusual experiment in classical conditioning. (p. 227)

[Adventure,] love, and magical possibility are driven off the map to a separate, mythic region, and London becomes even more "charter'd" than William Blake had imagined…. The War brings about this extra-organized, super-efficient reality, for in times of crisis, political leaders cannot afford the luxury of emotion, imagination, and sensuality…. (p. 228)

[The] "reality" of Gravity's Rainbow exhibits a zany, paranoid warp, with a victim-protagonist like Slothrop in a laboratory cage as a model for civilized and organized experience, manipulated by a Pavlovian with "hands that could as well torture people as dogs and never feel their pain."… This gives the book a grotesque, over-dramatized, comic-book feeling. (p. 230)

The poetic Blicero with his romantic longing for transcendence (middle passage) and his love for Rilke, his Manichean despair of earthly life and of generation, expresses the same mentality as the more obviously villainous and comic "mad scientists," Jamf and Pointsman. The sexual and political implications of Jamf's organic chemistry and the presumption of authority in Pointsman's conditioning suggest how modern "reality," even in its scientific basis, persecutes and represses eros (as in the case of Roger Mexico) and exerts arbitrary control through deadly manipulation (as in the case of Slothrop). (p. 232)

The Zone is an existential carnival where national identities and allegiances can be shed and assumed, bartered like secondhand clothes because of the absence of national, civilized, ordinary, socially-defined reality. This Wild West and gangster atmosphere is mythic American, and the limited reality of common sense and empirical science is transcended. (p. 234)

Slothrop's experience in the Zone is, like his trip down the toilet, a descent into the heart of darkness in a surreal dreamland, a mythic journey through the underworld that reaches its nadir when Slothrop achieves his ostensible goal—the Schwarzgerät—without realizing it, in the engine room of the Anubis. (p. 235)

[The] Zone is most obviously otherworldly, surreal and hallucinated, in its potential for nightmare and garish revelation of "reality."

In the Zone, as in the sodium amytal dream, we see into the darkness of the white European unconscious, and the demons rush into the light: the body, dirt, earth, excrement, darkness, non-white people, mystery, death…. (p. 236)

[Pynchon] elaborates this theme with zany humor, sickening horror, and stunning fullness—how European science, technology, theology, arts, economics, politics, history express such obsessions by building monuments of resistance and rockets of escape from these organic realities, in a vain, monstrous attempt to gain power over them…. (p. 237)

[Slothrop's vision in the Zone] is clearly an alternative to the "reality" of the fathers, in which organic process is simplified, mechanized, abstracted, synthesized, and controlled….

He has indeed journeyed "over the rainbow," but without the Hollywood ending: Slothrop cannot return home like Dorothy, to the comforting familiarity of "reality." There is no returning from a black hole, only perhaps a moving through and beyond…. (p. 238)

In place of ordinary reality, the Zone offers mythic possibility because it is out of space and time, "lost to history." (p. 240)

The Zone finally allows Slothrop to consummate a fundamental American myth in which the individual becomes invisible, is absorbed by nature, the land, the people…. (p. 242)

Slothrop achieves a kind of immortality different from the perverse, doomed version of immortality sought by the white European Fathers…. (p. 243)

Within the Zone Slothrop is finally put into perspective as a minor figure in the story of Weissmann, Enzian, and Tchitcherine, just as America, however interesting or flamboyant in itself, is, finally, in any sort of global or historical context, only the modern extension of an old story begun in Europe in the Renaissance, a projectile from Europe. Slothrop is sympathetic and even lovable, but he is mascotsized, adolescent next to more mature, heavier figures such as Enzian and Tchitcherine. (p. 244)

To live beyond reality, as in the Zone, is not merely to find refuge in mythology or to escape with drugs and sex. It is to rediscover the cruelty and violence, the inadequacy of many of our myths—and perhaps to discard or transcend them, as in the case of Tchitcherine passing over his brother, and Slothrop escaping the controlling father. Finally, much of mythology is local and ephemeral, and because it tends to fix us on the map and the calendar, it must be given up. (pp. 249-50)

It is evidence of the ironic optimism of Gravity's Rainbow that the final and most cruel manipulation of Slothrop, sending him into the Zone as a secret weapon in an intelligence war, allows him to escape reality's control. In the midst of the grotesquerie and the suffering, there is a way out, an alternative. What is doomed, however, is the impulse, centrally expressed in the rocket, to escape gravity's rainbow, or the return to earth—the impulse to avoid mortality by sublimation; and what is doomed is a culture based on that vain struggle of "life against death," as Norman O. Brown puts it. Although Gravity's Rainbow shows us that we are now, and have been, witnessing white European culture's self-created apocalypse, it poses the possibility that while European culture and the "reality" it created have been burning out in a fiery return to earth since the end of World War II, this is not to be lamented, but rather understood and perhaps celebrated—at the very least, affirmed, because such cultural destruction provides a psychic wilderness of new possibilities. The values of a culture and its achievements and atrocities exist in time and are thus not eternal. But existence is not equatable with any single culture. Just being able to see the finiteness, the inevitable end of white European culture that with its objectified "reality" turns living beings into things, is to begin to recover nothing less than the experience of life and death as a single mystical process…. (pp. 250-51)