Inconvenience would fit right in, as one more effect whose only purpose was to entertain.
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This fits with how this book has started, as an easily accessible boy's adventure novel. "Don't worry, readers! This big airship is just a standard entertainment! Just a bit of adventuring fluff! It doesn't represent anything else at all!" Even though it probably does represent something else. Early on, I speculated that the Inconvenience represents the book Against the Day itself. This sentence is pretty good evidence toward that supposition. Here we have a book, Against the Day, whose only purpose is to entertain. But that's the illusion of it. It's actually there to observe the people. And what else does good literature purport to do other than reflect a mirror back on the reader, as if it had been spying on us all along.
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P.S. the First
Taking another pass at the name of the airship, perhaps it's Pynchon commenting on the need for a plot or an entertainment to make the things he actually wants to discuss palatable to the reading audience. The plot is an inconvenient necessity to express Pynchon's view of the world. Without the veneer of entertainment, few people might be tricked into reading Pynchon's thoughts on quaternions, or the loss of the Frontier, or the effect of technology on people's lives or history or changing times. Without talking dogs and adventuring boys and drug-addled boner poppers and shit-eating generals and vampiric masons and underground post offices, how could Pynchon expose the crimes of those fools always in power, who commit genocide and destroy all that is good in the world for a couple of bucks and the joy of power?
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