novel, not least in the characters’ conversations with each other. Everyone talks about the coming war, but no one really seems interested in averting it. The war is rather considered to be an inevitable event, an abyss at the end of a rapidly sloping historical terrain, and therefore the war does in the end become inevitable. By drifting passively along with the flow of history and considering the not yet materialized war to be a fait accompli, the characters submit to a false determinism and thus contribute to the reduction of a historical field of possibilities into a foregone conclusion. Through his meticulous mapping of this historical crossroads and its repressed possibilities, Pynchon shows that World War I was initially anything but inevitable, but at the same timehe analyzes the psychological mechanisms and sins of omission which nevertheless contributed to its eventual manifestation.13 In light of the novel’s prolonged build-up to the Armageddon14 of World War I, it seems surprising how little space the novel actually devotes to the war itself. Even though Against the Day contains a number of fully fleshed characters, we experience the war through the eyes of the less than real Chums of Chance. From their otherworldly perspective, they barely discover that war has broken out, and later they primarily experience it from the sheltering cocoon of neutral Switzerland: not as brutal battles in the mud of Flanders – “the mass grave of history” (554) – but as a shortage of goods and as passing freight trains filled with prisoners of