Gravity's Rainbow, Domination and Freedom

Turned down by the 1974 Pulitzer Prize board for obscenity (though winning the National Book Award the same year), Gravity's Rainbow is a landmark text that has dominated Pynchon's oeuvre for over four decades, showing off his remarkable qualities as a "surrealist, pornographer, [and] word engineer" (17), as he once described himself, and many other interesting things besides. [...]on, however, the writers get squeamish about this, suggesting ethical interpretations of the more dubious sex scenes in Gravity's Rainbow, which infamously include pedophilia, coprophilia, and incest fantasies, considering them "withering satire[s] of control" (81)-of patriarchy, empire, and so on.