THE PURITAN REFLEX: PARANOIA IN THOMAS PYNCHON’S GRAVITY’S RAINBOW

The present article studied Thomas Pynchon s illustration of paranoid obsessions in Gravity’s Rainbow and examined the grounds on which such obssessions are formed. The article focused on the way paranoia provides Pynchon’s characters with an absured defense mechanism against their fragmented consiousness. Drawing on pynchon’s own definition of paranoia and principles of Puritanism, the writer attempted to display the theological axis within which Pynchon plots his characters’ paranoid fascination with enemy and investigated the inevitable consequences of such fascination for them. In the course of the study it was revealed that characters of Gravity’s Rainbow resort to paranoia as the only possible means to reach a transcendence to endow their lives with meaning, and that their attempt to restore order through paranoia is futile.