Chapter 5

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

If your edition has 183 pages, follow the pages marked a:

If your edition has 152 pages, follow b:

a: 103, b: ? - FSM's, YAF's, VDC's
Free Speech Movement, Young American's for Freedom, and ?

a: 103, b: ? - a national reflex to certain pathologies in high places only death had the power to cure
Presumably, the McCarthy era, which only ended with McCarthy's death in 1957.

a: 103, b: ? - Siwash
A fictional college in stories by George Fitch (d. 1915), American author. Also, a small usually inland college that is notably provincial in outlook.

a: 104, b: ? - Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph
?, ?, and Joseph McCarthy.

a: 104, b: ? - a shirt on various Polynesian themes and dating from the Truman administration
Recalls the shirt worn by Slothrop in Part 2 of Gravity's Rainbow, even though that one was Hawaiian and worn a few months before Truman took office.