Julian Murphet’s case for calling Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow “the ‘Iliad’ of our times” is about the novel’s epic scale and antiwar vision—not a claim that it retells Homer. First published in 1973, the novel follows a V-2 rocket plot through the European theatre of 1944–45, then keeps widening its frame to people and systems that official accounts of war can leave at the margins. The analogy is compelling, but not a consensus: readers have also called the book unreadable, overwrought, or obscene.
What is Gravity’s Rainbow about?
Pynchon’s novel is set in the closing years of the Second World War. Its narrative centres on Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant whose sexual encounters appear to correspond to the impact locations of German V-2 rockets. That strange pattern gives the book a thread to follow, but not a simple, steadily advancing plot.
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Slothrop is better understood as a “pseudo-protagonist” than as the unquestioned hero of a conventional war story. The novel ranges among a large cast—including figures such as Katje Borgesius, Roger Mexico and Oberst Enzian—and moves through flashbacks, digressions, comedy and elaborate set pieces. Julian Murphet’s anniversary essay describes these departures as extensions of the central story rather than escapes from it. Readers who want a concise plot summary may find that structure frustrating; readers willing to follow its associations may find it part of the novel’s account of a world that refuses to stay neatly organized.
Why does Murphet compare it with the Iliad?
In his 2023 anniversary essay for Scroll, published with credit to The Conversation, literary scholar Julian Murphet calls the novel “our very own Iliad” and a hymn against war. His comparison rests on the book’s breadth: an expansive cast, a war fought through technologies and institutions as well as named battles, and an attention to human experience that does not end when an official milestone declares a conflict finished.
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That is an interpretive analogy, not a claim of direct adaptation. Pynchon does not retell Homer’s epic. Murphet uses the Iliad to convey the scale and antiwar force he sees in Pynchon’s novel: a work that looks beyond military strategy to the people caught within war’s systems.
Murphet also argues that the book connects wartime violence to markets, technology and power, rather than treating the war as a sealed-off episode. Its popular-cultural references and commercial fantasies, in his reading, are part of how the novel explores people’s access to reality. These are critical claims about what the novel does, not a documented statement of Pynchon’s own intention.
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How does the novel’s fragmented form shape its argument?
The V-2 plot offers a point of orientation, but the book repeatedly branches into other characters, periods and modes. Its prose can shift from elevated to comic, from technical detail to popular culture, and from narrative momentum to digression. For Murphet, that zigzagging form enlarges the story: war is not presented as a sequence of cleanly bounded events, but as a force spreading across lives and systems.
The same formal choice can make the book difficult to read. A reader may find that the diversions deepen the central pattern, or feel that they interrupt it. Difficulty alone does not prove literary achievement; the question is whether the novel’s formal sprawl makes its vision of war more legible or less so.
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Is Gravity’s Rainbow an antiwar novel?
Murphet reads it as one, and his description of it as a hymn against war is supported by the novel’s refusal to confine violence to the battlefield or to a neat historical ending. Its subject, in this account, includes the machinery and power structures that shape wartime experience. Calling it antiwar is therefore a persuasive critical reading, rather than a neutral label that settles every question about the book.
Reception has been sharply divided. Murphet’s essay recounts that the Pulitzer Prize Board called the novel “unreadable”, “turgid”, “overwritten” and “obscene”; other readers regard it as a major epic. The contrast matters: the features that support Murphet’s argument—scale, digression and tonal instability—are also among the reasons some readers reject the book.
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Why is the novel considered important?
Gravity’s Rainbow won Thomas Pynchon the National Book Award in 1974, according to Penguin’s publisher page. Its reputation also rests on the ambition Murphet describes: a novel that treats war as more than a string of battles and asks how violence is entangled with technology, commerce and authority. Elfriede Jelinek, the 2004 Nobel laureate in literature, is quoted in Murphet’s essay saying, “It is a joke he hasn’t received the Nobel Prize and I have. […] I cannot receive the Nobel Prize as long as Pynchon hasn’t got it! That is against natural laws.” The remark conveys the scale of admiration the novel inspires, though it does not resolve the debate over its accessibility or achievement.
The “Iliad” label is useful if it makes a reader think about epic scale and war’s reach. It becomes less useful if taken to mean that the novel is coherent in the same way for every reader, or that its literary status is beyond dispute. Murphet’s comparison is strongest as an invitation to read the novel as an expansive, deliberately difficult antiwar work—not as a final verdict on how it must be understood.
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Which edition is available?
Penguin lists a Vintage Classics paperback edition of Gravity’s Rainbow, ISBN 9780099511755, at 912 pages. The publisher page links to Amazon UK; availability, price and retailer listings can vary by marketplace.
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