Pig Bodine

Seaman "Pig" Bodine is a fictional character appearing in many novels written by Thomas Pynchon. Bodine appears in V. (1963), and recurs in Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Characters named Bodine also appear in Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006). He also occurs in the short-story "Low-lands" (1960, 1984). 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. Another seafaring Bodine, referred to only as "O.I.C." (Officer in Command), briefly makes a cameo in Against the Day, again in an appearance with no obvious purpose besides as an intertextual in-joke.