Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.

“In Gravity’s Rainbow a character remarks, speaking of the V-rocket, ‘We’ll all use it someday, to leave the earth. To transcend.’ In both novels technology, the instrument that man thinks can further his evolution to the superhuman, is really the death trap that hastens his reduction to the subhuman. The tendency toward the inanimate is, as Nathanael West put it, ‘a tropism for disorder,’ a tendency away from pattern,’ from certitude, from ways of knowing what has happened and what might happen next. Stencil disguises ‘to involve him less with the chase,’ to protect the scrap of humanity which the chase itself provides. What Stencil really fears is that, as in the case of Kilroy, humanity itself is only another disguise. ‘Approach and avoid’ is Stencil’s rule, because to find V. would mean the loss of everything. ‘Disguise is one of her attributes.’ She is metaphor for the connection that makes any meaning, knowledge, or humanity possible; and she may be, in Fausto’s terms, the Greatest Lie of all.” Richard Patteson, “What Stencil Knew: Structure and Certitude in Pynchon’s V.” (Critique Vol. 16, 1974)