Osmo, Lord Blatherard

This character works at the British Foreign Office, occupying the Novi Pazar desk and has an obsessive fantasy about a gigantic Adenoid consuming London. Osmo is eventually found drowned in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding at the home of A Certain Viscountess. The name is a combination of “blather”, meaning to talk endlessly and “Osmo” being derived from osmosis, the process by which the Adenoid absorbs its victims. Weisenburger points this out as a reference to Charlie Chaplin's film The Great Dictator in which the central character (an obvious parody of Adolf Hitler) is named "Adenoid Hynkel"1.

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part and episode listing

Beyond the Zero: [2]

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page numbers

14, 15, 16

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references

  1. ^Weisenburger, Steven, A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel (Second Edition) (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 25

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