Gravity's Rainbow is an extraordinary web of links among characters and actions, doubles, role-playing and role-reversing. Images of coordinating systems, parallel ideals, cross it at every point and at every level of theme and plot. (p. 201)

[The pretty young things of Gravity's Rainbow] nurture life, offer a moment of warmth, light, safety, truth, wherever we find them. Preterites, given bottom billing on the program, they offer what they can and what they have, passing Slothrop along from hand to bed humbly, generously, hilariously, into that final Humility which Enzian, the Herero-Nguarorerue, knows he is to be denied and envies deeply. As reward, they are spared Pynchon's satire and given his gaiety and tenderness and compassion. (p. 203)

Yet the "girls" have no representative among the major female characters of the novel. They really do serve as "moments"—the little life-flow that Slothrop first understands them to be. Numerous as they are, they can unite in no lasting resistance to the breeding death. Their breasts warm hands in cold doorways; and the light they throw against the raging dark has energy no stronger than an "English firefly," Slothrop's metaphor for their peaceful postcoital cigarettes. Though least of all expendable, they are expended. (p. 204)

On the prism of creative force … is Jessica Swanlake—on the one hand, just another "young rosy girl in the uniform of an ATS private" …; on the other, a power strong enough to waken the dead. (p. 205)

Roger tells Jessica repeatedly, "My mother is the war"; and from that lady he carries, no matter how innocently, the genes of death…. [Ironically], it is just that Mother's son that renders Jessica's magic impotent. (p. 208)

As Jessica literally jumps into Roger's world as a bomb explodes at their first accidental meeting, so she has been allowed to bring him into life only so he can suffer dying. Like the wall-slogan of the Weimar Republic, the action suggests that it is not, in this world, better to have loved and lost, but deadly to have loved at all. And the war, triumphantly, is Roger's mother still.

With just enough exception to prove the rule, the war in fact is a fairly representative Pynchon mother. Until the "accident" of Jessica, she had drained Roger of hope and the joy of hope fulfilled—left him not heartless, but with a heart paralyzed, numb, uncommitted—given him, as he himself realizes, "a somber youth squarely founded on Death,"… and bequeathed him its component conviction that everything is predictable, unchangeable. The Mothers of Gravity's Rainbow, then, are a perversion of the "girls." Their wombs nourish life, but their children once born take from their breasts not only physical strength but a taste for death, an aptitude for dying. (pp. 209-10)

To wither further the old life-giving adage, it is, then, not only better not to have loved, but, best of all, not even to have been born. And Pynchon's concern with origins, with discovering where we first took the terrible turn into the nonhuman twentieth century, leads him to worry not only about the effects of such mothers on the child but how Mothers came to be converted from the loving "girls." If one can look upon V. in relation to Gravity's Rainbow as one views Joyce's Portrait in relation to Ulysses, as my colleague Richard Johnson suggests we do, we can discover passages in V. that explicate what Gravity's Rainbow directly renders. (p. 211)

It is just that terrifying unpredictability of accident and its power in the act of creation, that inscrutable life-giving force, operating on no rule of cause and effect or any other rational principle, that drives mothers, as the Pynchon of V. sees it, into secret alliance, ironically serving the Establishment of unrejuvenating death. (p. 212)

A girl, to endure the terrifying knowledge that her sexual joy is used by impersonal forces to convert her, will-she won't-she, into an incubator of life, has conspired to conceal her helplessness, her lack of control over the most intimate processes of her being, by creating the stultifying myths of Motherhood. (p. 213)

That Pynchon finds Slothrop as implicated as Greta is abundantly clear. Slothrop is not only an Orpheus who didn't even try, he is also—to Greta and her child—a Tannhäuser for whom the Pope's staff never flowers …, who never frees himself from the Venusberg of this novel, but wanders near its perimeters, the Lunesberg Heath, where the only underground orgies are rocket-assemblies. (pp. 214-15)

[Not] just Slothrop, then, or Greta, but all of us have joined in the corporate act of the murder of exploitable innocence…. Greta, the most fallen, the least human of Pynchon's mothers, is, after all, "Their" creation, "Their" tool. If Slothrop is weakened and used here by the debilitating morality of his Puritanic judgments …, Greta is vulnerable because "she always enjoyed it too much, chained up in those torture rooms."… Though both characters sense the horror of their destructive acts, neither really understands enough to reverse or restrain his moves. (p. 215)

[The] immensity of Pynchon's sorrowing love for the universally anthropomorphized beings of Gravity's Rainbow extends easily to the human shard that is Greta. (pp. 215-16)

Except for the narrating voice of the novel and the voices of those beyond the interface that separates what-we-agree-to-call-life from physical death, only Leni Pökler understands how "They" manipulate, how the Mothers, the Fathers, are made for Their purposes, and only Leni has the strength to resist Them…. (p. 216)

Leni's long daydream, which begins with a Lesbian fantasy, reflecting a primitive sexual attraction as part of her anti-Semitism, quickly dissolves itself into the life that might have been, a workers' paradise of sexual equality and joy…. (p. 218)

Pynchon nowhere softens or dilutes the solemnity and terrible courage of Leni's lonely struggle in the endless, shelterless streets…. Perhaps, by keeping her offstage, by shielding the scenes of her pain from direct presentation, Pynchon intends to preserve her from the too-easy pity of his readers. For whatever reason, in the Leni passages his prose is at its most ordinary, least witty, least allusive, least imaginative.

As a result, Leni seems to me one of the least attractive characters in the novel—quick, it is true, with hard-fought-for life and highly admirable, she nevertheless emerges two-dimensional, unlovable, unpitiable, cold. How much then is Pynchon saying, if his stylistic treatment of the most fully and consciously liberated woman in the novel strikes other readers as it does me? (pp. 219-20)

Gravity's Rainbow creates a world, a moving frighteningly close image of our own, gone "bad" because it once failed in love, once refused to understand that the true function of the Preterite was to define the election of the Elect, and so, misunderstanding, failed to love them and damned them instead to loneliness, fright, and a life-denying hunger to feel safe—and thereby replaced the wheel of life, the fecund cycle of rejuvenating death on which both Preterite and Saint might joyously have ridden, with the gear's mechanical imitation of movement and its continuing replication of depletion, pollution, death-engendering death. In such a world, what is it to say that, after all, the contributions of the sexes are equally dismaying? (pp. 225-26)