Gravity's Rainbow begins evocatively with a dream by Captain Geoffrey Pirate Prentice, a prominent member of the American military personnel stationed in a maisonette in England, alongside his regiment. It is nearing the end of the Second World War. Prentice's dream is fueled by a deep sense of dread, and his imagery is Dantean, and calls to mind T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland: a hellish portrait of people from all walks of life, of all ages and shapes and sizes evacuating a grand city about to come crashing down at any moment thanks to war's unpredictability. It is a sad, strangely static series of movements, punctuated by a crippling sense of purposelessness in the face of absolute despair.
But Pirate wakes up to a comparatively cheerier reality, although by no means less dangerous. The scene is one straight out of the funny books: think Beetle Bailey. Pirate saves a colleague from falling down his cot, and quickly ascends to the rooftops to breathe in the morning air, which clears his head somewhat. Someone has turned the rooftop into a hothouse, with soil and manure and everything; Pirate himself uses it to grow bananas, of all things! A miniature, throbbing tropical paradise in the heart of the war, this is Pynchon's first clue that his is going to be a starkly visual novel, not to mention a surreal one as well, odd set pieces odder because of their sheer plausibility within the context Pynchon paints for himself. Life, fecundity and growth inform the otherwise dread inducing prospect of war: anytime the newly developed and super secret German V2 rockets will come crashing down and obliterate everything. As fate would have it, Pirate spots a trail of smoke in the sky. Strangely enough, he does not panic, even though every inch of his being is screaming at him to flee and warn the others. Perhaps something inside him senses the futility of the endeavor. Instead, he concentrates on his bananas, suddenly aware of the V2 rocket's peculiarity, which is its own relief. You see, you hear a V2 bomb coming in before you see it. So if you've already seen it, you're not dead...yet. Pirate descends the ladder into the maisonette again, carrying a lapful of bananas.
This chapter is informed by the overarching thematic of courage and humor, and the sheer lust for life, in the face of precarity and inevitable death.
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