The Small Rain is a short story written by Thomas Pynchon. First published in 1959 and later reprinted in the collection Slow Learner, it tells of a town destroyed by a hurricane.
Characters[]
- "Lardass" Levine - the main character, a specialist in the Army stationed near Creole
- Rizzo - a specialist
- "Buttercup" - a girl that Levine meets
- Capucci - an orderly
- Baxter - a specialist
- Picnic - a specialist
- Pierce - an ROTC and a graduate of M.I.T.
- "Twinkletoes" Dugan - a company clerk with a somewhat heavy accent and racist viewpoints of the world
Plot[]
In the mid-July of 1957, an army specialist named Levine was stationed in Louisiana, specifically a base known as Fort Roach, for nearly a year. Upon waking up, Levine found out that the Lieutenant was asking for him. Once in the lieutenant's office, Levine learns that he and a few other specialists from Bravo Company are going out to deal with something in the nearby Lake Charles area. Levine (who is accompanied by two other specialists named Rizzo and Baxter) knows little about this deployment until he finds a newspaper detailing the destruction of an island town named Creole by a hurricane - killing everyone in the town and completely flooding it.
The next morning, Levine awakens in a rainstorm and, while out with the other specialists, meets a young blonde who jokingly calls herself Buttercup. Once at the ruins of Creole, Levine and his specialists find corpsmen pulling bodies out of the water and piling them up to be moved to the high school (which presumably escaped the flooding)'s gymnasium. After several hours of this, the specialists travel to a bar where one of them drunkenly tries to start a fight and fails.
The next morning, Levine leaves early and takes a boat to Creole. Once there, he meets up with Buttercup and "sleeps" with her in her somewhat dilapidated home. The day after this, Levine is given leave and decides to visit New Orleans once he goes on leave. The story ends with Levine musing with a few other specialists on the rain.
| Works of Thomas Pynchon | ||
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Early works (Collected in Slow Learner) | ||