characters. Their ontological status is therefore highly uncertain, and as a confirmation that they are slightly out of joint with the rest of the story, they seem to age much slower than the more earthbound characters. Even though Against the Day begins with the experiences of the ethereal Chums, the airborne lads can hardly be described as the main characters of the novel. They do reappear frequently throughout the story, but they disappear just as quickly and they are therefore just as difficult to pin down as the remaining cast of characters. One would be hard put to determine who the most important characters of Pynchon’s novel are. Against the Day has hundreds of named characters, whose destinies weave in and out of each other across decades andcontinents. Fifteen or twenty of these characters do appear more frequently than the rest, but Against the Day is nevertheless most aptly described as a collective novel or a network narrative, where the true protagonist is the world around 1900. The characters’ different missions and agendas bring them to remote corners of the globe, where they constantly run into each other in the most unlikely places. When the young American Kit Traverse wanders around in the middle of the night in the Siberian wilderness as part of a personal quest, he accidentally stumbles into an old acquaintance from the American East Coast. The novel is full of such wildly improbable encounters, and Pynchon has clearly enjoyed toying with this convention from 19th century literature, where characters constantly ran