In the Zone

The following concerns page 303:

In episode 2 of Part 3, Slothrop finds himself in the Nordhausen works where the rockets were transported through tunnels. Pynchon describes the ambience of this underworld where artificial matter dominates:

"All objects have grown still, drowned, enfeebled with evening, terminal evening. Tough skins of oxides, some only a molecule thick, shroud the metal surfaces, fade out human reflection. Straw-colored drive belts of polyvinyl alcohol sag and release their last traces of industrial odor."

Chemical and industrial materials (in particular the polymers used in the V-2) have digested whatever human traces remain. They are sovereign entities, much like the V-2 itself when it is released. Pynchon reveals how man has removed himself in the creation of warheads. Although bombs are made and directed by humans, they take on a life of their own. The symbolism of the Brennschluss point, "end of rocket's ascent when fuel is cut-off and it gives way to gravity" (http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/b.html), comes into play. When the initial energy given to the rocket burns out, gravity goes beyond being a physical force and becomes a cosmic power, controlling the life and death of whatever it strikes, raining down on the Earth as if the gods were displeased.

The lack of humanity in these underpasses gives birth to haunting energies, the "traffic of somewhere remote". Here everything seems to stop, "There is no more History, no time-traveling capsule to find your way back to". Such an absence does not create a wasteland, but exudes an entirely different potency, which suggests something paranormal, something most definitely ambiguous. The "Uncertainty" that Pynchon describes is the blurred line between the living and the dead in a war zone. "Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living"...these are the prisoners of Nordhausen-Dora concentration camp who made and transported the V-2 rockets. The author reveals that in order to create such fatal weapons, the handwork must come from a soulless place, and what better than from the mangled bodies of war prisoners.