Pig Bodine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seaman "Pig" Bodine is a fictional character appearing in many of the novels of Thomas Pynchon. Bodine appears in V. (1963), and recurs in Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and characters named Bodine appear in Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006). A character called "Fender-Belly Bodine," presumably an ancestor of "Pig," appears as a seaman in Mason & Dixon. First developed in V. as sidekick and comic foil to protagonist Benny Profane, Bodine reappears (set a decade or more earlier) in Gravity's Rainbow. An "O.I.C." Bodine briefly appears in Against the Day, in turn-of-the-20th century Colorado, again in an appearance with no obvious purpose besides as an intertextual in-joke.