/lit/ - Literature

>>19058915
Born into a secular culture? Boom, an atheist. Except historically that's not really what happened in the 20th century when communists tried to abolish religions but new atheist faggots don't know shit about history and think they're 2000iq geniuses for coming up with the same conclusions Democritus did thousands of years as of it's a brand new fucking idea.

Atheism is peak Reddit faggotry and brainlet shit.

>>19054936
Banana

Previous thread >>18466610

I finished Beyond the Zero but I'm going back to a few confusing passages and trying to get as much as I can out of this part before moving into part 2. How is everyone else doing?

>>18466737
>>18466758
They're phallic, but just as importantly they are an 'arc' shape. The arc is a half-circle that is incomplete and which ends in the 'earth', or in material existence. This goes against the spiritual continuity that extends beyond the earth and forms a full circle -- or that is, the circular rainbow that Pirate sees in the novel's opening pages.

In this way, the phallic undertones of the banana prefigures the rocket, which is engineered to penetrate the ground and bridge the divide between material and spiritual existence. Of course, the attempt to bridge this divide can only end in destruction. Pynchon also views the arc of the rocket as the apogee and embodiment of the Western scientific tradition, or more specifically, of a Newtonian mechanistic viewpoint of the world that seeks to map all phenomena within a visual schematic (an historical arc that likewise culminates in the destruction of WWII and, at the novel's end, nuclear holocaust). A lot of this will become clearer as you go deeper into the novel.