GRDP: Day 6
I didn’t read at all on Saturday, so my progress slowed a bit. I’m now on page 156, and since the next row of boxes is about twenty pages away and I’m getting a headache, I’m calling it quits for the night.
One thing I noticed while flipping through future pages was a mostly blank page with a big number “2” and what looked like some kind of quote, like the one from Wernher Van Braun that began this crazy adventure. Looking back, that first page did have a big number “1” at the top as well as a title, “Beyond the Zero”. What the hell is this? Am I reaching the end of a 180-page chapter? Is this like the breaks between “books” in each volume of The Lord of the Rings?
V. is split up among sixteen chapters, and each one began with a short summary of the chapter’s contents that sometimes helps prepare the reader to understand what’s going on and sometimes doesn’t. The chapters are split into sections, each headed by a Roman numeral, that provide convenient resting points and are more or less replaced by the rows of boxes in Gravity’s Rainbow. Since I’ve gone a hundred and fifty freaking pages without a proper chapter break, I had since forgotten abouth that big number one at the beginning and just assumed the entire book was a single stream of violently meandering thoughts broken by the rows of boxes. What does that big number two mean? There can’t be much of a marked shift in setting or plot, since those shifts happen just as happily right in the middle of a paragraph. Will it be a shift in theme? A replacement of symbols? Is all of the time I spent trying to reconcile the Pavlovian, statistical and supernatural views as they apply to love and war going to be thrown out in another thirty pages? That big number terrifies me.