"Going off my trolley. And you're trying to help me get back to the way most people live, 's that it?"
* * * * * * * * * *
"Going off my trolley"
This means going mad. So this is another interpretation of what's happening to Lew. Has he simply gone insane? In a way, can't that be seen as losing one's path to their destiny? If we assume madness as some kind of outside affliction, couldn't it be seen as the cause of derailing so many people's destinies, causing them to miss out on the life they were supposed to lead had they kept their sanity? This is a philosophical argument because we can just as easily believe that insanity was their destiny and there was no way to avoid it.
In Mason & Dixon, Reverend Cherrycoke is banished from England after being declared insane to rebuke him for his leaflets proclaiming certain personages in authority as criminals and miscreants. Being declared mad is a punishment for not keeping your trolley on the track expected of you. Cherrycoke realizes that his name, the thing that is almost interchangeable with his actual identity, never belonged to him. Names are labels for bureaucratic use by authoritarians to keep watch on and to punish those who bounce from their intended rails. Lew is suffering much the same problem. Lew doesn't remember sinning but he's paying the price for somebody using his name (presumably him but, well, he doesn't remember it) which is now tied to the horrible reputation. His name is the signifier for others to treat him punitively.
I suppose Tyrone Slothrop also goes mad in quite a number of ways in Gravity's Rainbow but I can't quite pluck out any specific scenes from my memory right now. But as for names, he does, in a relatively close space to the center of the book, become dubbed Rocketman. With his new name, he accomplishes things Slothrop probably wouldn't have had the nerve to accomplish and finds himself in places he almost certainly would never have found himself as Slothrop. Like a rocket blasting free from Earth's gravitational pull, Slothrop frees himself by shedding the name that doesn't actually belong to him and taking up an anonymous superhero moniker.
"you're trying to help me get back to the way most people live"
I don't know if Drave is trying to do that, exactly. At this point, I'm not sure what Drave's interest in Lew is. Unless Drave is the devil and he's trying to grab up another soul. Otherwise what does Drave have to gain in this matter? Unless this is some kind of Scientology scheme and he's trying to get Dave back out in the real world to become a success and to owe that success to Drave's weird community, kicking back monthly payments to Drave.
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