Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home to find a letter naming her executrix of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a man with whom she had once had an affair. Pierce was a California real estate mogul with a great number of assets and Oedipa was shocked to be in charge of sorting it out. Hoping to divert herself, she pushed her thoughts back to old memories of Pierce, music, and sunrises. The letter was signed by the co-executor, Metzger, and detailed that Pierce died a year ago but they had just found the will. She did her errands downtown in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines and tried to uncover what might have happened a year ago to cause Pierce to name her in the will.

Finally, during the evening news, she remembered a three A.M. phone call she received a year ago, made by Pierce. He had spoken to her in different voices, spilling out nonsense. That was the last Oedipa had heard from him. Soon, her husband, Wendell "Mucho" Maas, arrived home with his own problems. He complained, as he always did, that he did not care about the radio station, KCUF, where he was a disc jockey and that his boss, Funch, was trying to censor him. Mucho had formerly worked as a used car salesman, a profession he did care about, until he could no longer take it. The used cars brought in were like sad, old, used extensions of their owners, and of life. Mucho tried as hard as he could to look and act as far from a stereotypical used car salesman as possible, but the job overwhelmed him anyhow. Oedipa tried unsuccessfully to calm the fearful memories he retained from this line of work. She showed Mucho the letter, but he told her to take it to their lawyer.

That night, at three A.M., Dr. Hilarius, Oedipa's shrink, called and asked Oedipa if she was taking his tranquilizer pills. She refused to take the pills or to join his experiment, Die Brücke, which tested hallucinogenic drugs on housewives. The next morning, little rested, Oedipa met with her lawyer, Roseman. He frantically hid a copy of his play indicting television lawyer, Perry Mason, when she entered. She noted that his guilty look was progress. Oedipa explained her situation and then they went to lunch, where Roseman played footsie with her. Back at his office, Roseman explained to Oedipa what she would have to do as executrix, informing her that she could pay him to do it but would not find out much about the will.

She would have many revelations because of the will, "about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away." She thought of herself as Rapunzel in a tower, Pierce having found his way to the top thanks to a credit card opening the doors. She thought of the painting by Remedios Varos she had once seen with Pierce in Mexico City which had made her cry. Out of the tower in the painting, wove a tapestry that contained the world and forced Oedipa to realize that her jaunts with Pierce, or with anyone, did not provide an escape. The fear was enough to make her go crazy or marry a disc jockey.

Chapter 1 Analysis:

Thomas Pynchon is well known for his complex fictional worlds of postmodern literature. The Crying of Lot 49 has often been defined as Pynchon's most accessible work, though also one of his densest. There are many cultural, technical, scientific, and historical references packed into the less than two hundred pages of the novel. It is a labyrinth of references and details and parodies which lead, according to some, toward and/or away from meaning and structure. Often more questions are raised then answered and for every binary presented, an inversion of the duality is also usually suggested. One of the most common terms thrown around in literary criticism concerning Crying is the "excluded middle." This will be discussed in much more depth as we continue but keep in mind that the progression toward dichotomy is also a progression toward the questioning of what lies between the two extremes. The gray area is very significant, while also asking the reader if it is significant only because the human being cannot be satisfied without an attempt at pointing significance.

The chapter begins in very typical fashion for the entire novel. Oedipa Maas is the main character and we learn first that she is coming home from a Tupperware party. As it is the middle of a summer day, we gather from this fact that she is a housewife since she is not working and is attending a Tupperware gathering, a clear symbol of mid-twentieth century American housewifery. As some critics have noted, the fact that the host of the party had likely put too much kirsch in the fondue shows that the party signifies superficial consumership in material America more than any type of sincere communal bonding as the hostess felt the need to get her attendees drunk in order to entertain them. The first sentence is very long and complicated, containing an introduction to Oedipa, the letter about the will, the character of Pierce Inverarity, and Oedipa's typical lifestyle. The amount of dependent clauses in the sentence is synecdochal for the entire work, bombarding the reader with information, both tangential and direct.

Names within the work have garnered much attention from all critical audiences and the fashion in which Pynchon approaches his naming is instrumental in the understanding of the literature. Oedipa has obviously been compared to her literary and psychological predecessors, from the Oedipus of Sophocles to the Oedipal theories of Freud. And, there are definite allusions and connections which can be drawn between our heroine and these figures. However, the majority of recent critics, such as Tanner, seem to believe that these allusions are partially red herrings, an attempt by Pynchon to lead the reader into drawing the easy references and falling into the traps readers so often do when they reach for allusions in order to find significance. Pynchon is possibly leading the reader into assumptions which they are all too likely to make so that they realize the error as they proceed within the postmodern novel which espouses a theme of non-categorization and structuralism. These critics have an interesting view which allows them to blend the former, more obvious allusion with the self-mocking quality which is also inherent. Grant tells us, "Hite remarks that Oedipa's name is 'initially merely ludicrous,' but that it 'loses its associations with Freudian trendiness as the quest proceeds, and begins to recall her truth-seeking Sophoclean predecessor.' Finally Cowart notes in passing that 'Oedipa' is 'a suitably neurotic name.'"

Oedipa's last name, Maas, usually draws the comparison to the term of mass, with some taking it as far as connecting her to Newton's theories on mass and inertia. The theories of inertia, entropy, and thermodynamics do enter in at times and will be discussed as we continue. Others have found translations of the word in languages where the meaning is web or net and have then linked, hyperbolically, Oedipa's life maze to the definitions of these. Pierce Inverarity's name has also been examined in full, though not as easily. His last name is thought to likely appeal to ideas of inverse, whether the inverse of rarity or truth has not been determined. In general, his name is symbolic for the inversion of Oedipa's monotonous life and the search for knowledge and meaning he sets her on. Mucho Mass is another name to observe, especially as his first name is often compared to the term, macho. The irony is apparent as Mucho is portrayed as both lust-seeking, "horny," and thin-skinned and vulnerable. He is laughably haunted by the remnants of the lives instilled within a used car lot. Still, as with all of the characters, the dimensions of his persona are somewhat contrived but allow for multiple interpretations. Dr. Hilarius is another seemingly obvious name which can be drawn to Pynchon's interpretation of the state of America. It is ridiculous that Oedipa does not know why she needs a shrink and does not trust her own, but still refuses to leave him. Ironically, we will later note the serious power Hilarius contained when he drags Mucho into his sardonic study, nicknamed Die Brücke.

By bringing Oedipa into the search for truth with his will, Pierce takes her away from her monotonous housewife existence. The reader watches as Oedipa tries to remember when she might have heard from Pierce a year before she learns of the will. Her thoughts take her through a well detailed account of her mundane set of errands, from buying ricotta while listening to muzak downtown to the California evening news, before she recalls the three A.M. phone call. Pierce's foolishness during that call arouses suspicion, as he refuses to use his own voice, his own identity, except during his last sentence to Oedipa where he threatens to bring the Shadow onto Mucho. The threat is in play, but then again, so it appears is the entire call. So, why call in the middle of the night? Oedipa does not know and neither will the reader. Pierce, in this fashion, refuses categorization. In his communication with Oedipa, he is fractionalized and broken into a myriad of characters. His phone call is symbolic of the rejection of structure and definition within the novel. He leads Oedipa on a search within herself, most would say, however one could also argue that Oedipa leads herself into this search keyed on by the circumstantial death and will of her former lover.

The image of the tapestry in Oedipa's daydream, concerning the Rapunzel tower, explicitly asks for critical analysis. Oedipa's search for information and cohesion within the world at large is symbolized by her entrapment by commercial society. Parallels have been constructed between the green bubble glasses that Oedipa wears when crying as she views the painting in Mexico City and the lone green eye that is a metaphor for the television screen. Furthermore, expanding the theme of disillusioning modern commercialism, Oedipa notes that in her vision, Pierce only reaches the top of her tower when he uses a credit card to shim his way up. She realizes that the world and all life is sewn into the tapestry which hangs from the painted tower and in the tapestry which hangs from the window of her existence. She tells the reader that she is no more free in Mexico with Pierce than she was any where else in the world. She could not escape. She falls from this tower in Mexico City to the mundane life she lives with Mucho, a life compared through metaphor by Oedipa to a deck of cards facing all in one direction and by Mucho to a "gray dressing of ash." Her tower is the inadequacy of definition and communication in the modern world. And, yet, she asks at the end of the chapter, "what else?" We are taken on her journey because the search for self and meaning and connection is insatiable, even when it is being parodied as is often the case with Pynchon.

Chapter 2 Summary:

Oedipa decided she should travel to San Narciso and look into Pierce's affairs. She told Mucho, who was slightly sad because of her departure, to ignore Dr. Hilarius and watch her oregano. She drove down to the city near Los Angeles in a rental car, expecting the city to stand out from the others. It did not. The pattern of buildings seemed to want to tell her something, but she could not understand what. The numbers on the offices ranged from 70 to the 80,000s, confusing Oedipa. She drove by YOYODYNE, a giant in the aerospace industry owned by Pierce. Though Oedipa decided to stop at the next motel she saw, she hesitated in front of "Echo Courts" and the raunchy nymph with the blowing skirt who rose above the sign. The face was similar to her own and she decided the place was good enough. Miles, the teenage manager, carried her bags to a room, singing a song in a feigned British accent from his rock group, the Paranoids. Oedipa offered to bring a cassette to her husband's station but Miles thought she was trying to sleep with him.

Later that night, Metzger the lawyer appeared, after searching through different motels for her. He was very good looking and had been a childhood actor, named Baby Igor. He carried a bottle of wine, interrupting Oedipa's lazy plans for the evening. Metzger fed Oedipa lines about his days as a star, adding that Pierce had only mentioned Oedipa once. She did not want to know what he said. They turned on the T.V., poured drinks, and noticed that one of Baby Igor's movies, Cashiered, was on. Oedipa was not sure that the coincidence was not a scam. Metzger told her about the plot. Almost every commercial that was broadcast during the breaks was a product or location owned by Pierce, such as the new housing development Fangoso Lagoons. Oedipa began to feel that she was in the middle of some kind of plot.

Soon, the wine ran out and Metzger pulled out a bottle of tequila, mentioning the time Oedipa and Pierce were in Mexico. He claimed he knew about the trip because Pierce wrote it off as a business expense. Metzger then tried to make a bet with Oedipa about the end of the movie. She thought betting on a finished movie was ridiculous but finally gave in and bet him anything that Baby Igor would not get out of the submarine alive. The reels of the movie became boggled and misplaced scenes were shown. Metzger allowed Oedipa to ask questions about what was going on in the movie if she agreed to play Strip Botticelli. Oedipa agreed and ran into the bathroom where she dressed herself with every piece of clothing and accessory she had brought. The new image of herself made Oedipa laugh so hard that she fell, knocking over a can of hair spray which shot off violently around the room. Before it died, the mirror and shower's glass panel had been shattered. When she and Metzger stood up, they noticed the members of The Paranoids watching them and thinking they were kinky. Oedipa asked for a serenade and they performed outside.

When their song ended, Pierce demanded Oedipa's first question about the movie. The Paranoids left a fifth of Jack Daniels on the doorsill and Oedipa poured yet another drink. Regardless of how many questions Oedipa asked, she did not seem to grow any thinner from the clothing she discarded. Metzger began undressing and a headache bloomed in Oedipa's head. At one point, Oedipa visited the bathroom and could not find her reflection. She remembered that the mirror had broken but felt very unsteady. When she returned to the bedroom, Metzger was asleep, aroused, and clad only in boxer shorts. She jumped on him, kissing him.

Twenty minutes later, Metzger had finally stripped Oedipa of all of her clothing but Oedipa was barely conscious. She awoke in the middle of a sexual crescendo and heard the Paranoids playing again. As both she and Metzger climaxed, the Paranoids blew a fuse and all of the power in the motel shut off. When the electricity returned, the T.V. showed Baby Igor being electrocuted in the sinking submarine. Oedipa jumped up, proclaiming that she had won the bet. She asked what Pierce had said about her. When Metzger told her that Pierce had said that she would not be easy, Oedipa cried. Metzger called her to him and, awhile later, she went.

Chapter 2 Analysis:

The chapter begins with Oedipa's departure from Kinneret for San Narciso in order to look into Pierce's affairs. The idea of place is very important within the novel, even at times when it seems the place represents stagnation or monotony as both of these locales will. The name Kinneret, as detailed by the critic, Robert Watson, alludes to the Sea of Galilee which had been alternately known as Lake Kinneret. Thus a reference to Jesus Christ is made, perhaps comparing Oedipa Maas to a savior within the novel. This is a curious reference, seeing as Oedipa is a generic housewife character yet a couple of reasons for the allusion exist. A religious undertone pervades the novel, asking the reader whether one is meant to apply religious ideals and allusions or whether the undertones are metonyms for the contemporary need to signify and inflate.

Also, Oedipa is starting on a journey, as the chapter begins by telling us that she is leaving Kinneret. She is going in search of truth and knowledge, a hyperbolic mission for a housewife who normally spends her days at Tupperware parties and the grocery store. In contrast to Jesus, however, she is looking for self-knowledge instead of looking to spread a message. In the mass consumer society in which Oedipa lives, the individual is in dire need of revelation, another term which is used often by Pynchon. Her search for revelation, pattern, and truth allows her to leave her Galilee and the life she had accepted there.

The place that Oedipa heads for is named San Narciso. Beyond soun ding like a typical Californian city name, the parallels to Narcissism and the myth of Narcissus are unmistakable. Self-evaluation is one of the byproducts of Oedipa's search, and more directly, by searching through the remnants of Pierce's life, the self-identity of modern American culture is also being revealed. However beyond self-evaluation, knowledge, or reflection, Narcissism implies an infatuation with the self. The myth of Narcissus, from which the term Narcissism has arisen, explores a man who becomes so infatuated with his reflection in a lake that he closes out the rest of the world for the false extension of himself.

In a scientific sense, as is often referenced in the novel, the closed system will move toward entropy in the same manner that the entire universal system will, both existentially and rationally. The world is contained within itself and has become a egotistical system moving toward a chaotic sense of orderlessness. As Thomas Shaub associates, "Pynchon's direct evocation of the Narcissus myth is a clear statement that Pierce's estate and what it represents are a culture in love with a dream-image of itself." This is the world that Oedipa enters in her search for Pierce, the truth, and herself and this is the world which will, in turn, become contained within herself.

Oedipa first notes that San Narciso has no identifiable differences to other Southern Californian cities. However, she will note the differences at a later time and the reader should note the lack of activity and the intense patterning that surrounds the city. Her first observation of the city tells us, "Nothing was happening." She notes only buildings, but mentions no people, exchange, or communication. The place is immediately stagnant. Oedipa then compares the layout of the city to the patterned inside of a transistor radio. She states, "The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had." In this ordered world of similar pink buildings and guard towers, a feeling of artifice and coldness prevails.

Moreover, Oedipa comes close to having a religious moment as she looks upon the stagnant city of San Narciso and she relates that moment to the relationship her husband had to the car lot. She feels close to realizing the supposed secrets which this structure holds inside but then the moment passes, as an illusion. We are left with the feeling that the symbolic gestures Pynchon makes, especially toward the religious end, may be illusions as well. As Oedipa enters the city, one of the first structures she observes is the YOYODYNE plant, a company owned by Pierce. Oedipa remembers that Pierce had described himself as one of the companies "founding fathers." This self-assumed title implies, as the critic J. Kerry Grant suggests, that the factory is a metonym for America itself and denotes that America may be one of Pierce's legacies to Oedipa as well. The conflict between seemingly religious signifiers and commercial signifiers is one which appears often within the novel.

The sign of the motel which Oedipa stops at arrests her and she hesitates before entering. The name is heavily symbolic and fits into the mythological scheme presented when Pynchon named Pierce's city San Narciso. The motel is named "Echo Courts." In the myth of Narcissus, the nymph Echo tries to win Narcissus's love by echoing fragments of Narcissus's speech but Narcissus was deaf to outside, entreaties. We see again how Narcissus, as a symbolic figure, symbolizes the closed system, also symbolized by Oedipa's closed tower. In addition, the face of the nymph displayed on the sign for the motel greatly resembles Oedipa's face. This parallel allows the reader to draw a direct comparison between the myth of Narcissus and Echo and the figure of Oedipa. To the critic, Hanjo Berressem, the likeness "implies that...Oedipa is in love with the narcissistic culture of which she herself is so much a part." However, one can also see the tawdry nymph as the distortion and commercialization of the classic ties which Oedipa herself has to classical myth and story.

The relationship between Oedipa and Metzger further draws on this idea. They spend nearly the entire night together watching a television movie which portrays Metzger, the lawyer, as a childhood actor. Oedipa herself thinks it is overly coincidental that a movie starring young Metzger would be playing on T.V. the night she meets him. She reflects, "Either he made up the whole thing...or he bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this, it's all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot." Furthering her thoughts of plot, a commercial for Pierce's property is advertised during the breaks from the movie. Each commercial is thus a synedoche for Pierce's holding of American commercialism, his hold on modern Americana and everything that Oedipa is searching for and is trapped within. Oedipa's first inklings of something being connected beyond her grasp are enhanced. She, much like the reader, is uncertain whether to connect all of the symbols, keys, and gestures she observes or to allow them to pass as empty, hyperbolic vehicles for a significance she is working too hard to create.

As she and Metzger begin to play the strip guessing game, Oedipa takes her first steps toward protecting herself against the attack or plot she feels may be coming. The game is a metonym for her entire search. She feels the answer is predetermined and that she is the only one who does not know what the outcome will be. She is willing to play but is still very skeptical and unsure of the rules within the game. Thus, Oedipa comically covers herself with much of the clothing she has brought, creating many layers over her body. As the reader will often feel as they navigate the novel, the more layers she will strip off, the more layers will seem to exist underneath. By the time Metzger strips Oedipa of all of her clothes, she is nearly unconscious. She wakes in the middle of a sexual climax but does not remember getting to that point. In Pynchon's satire, sex too is an empty gesture in the game. While Oedipa climaxes, the narrator tells the reader how she listened to each member of the Paranoids plug in, and was able to count six guitars, three more than the Paranoids normally played. Clearly, her concentration is not focused on the sexual act.

Relating back to the Ovid's myth of Narcissus and Echo, Oedipa's reflection of herself is shattered, symbolically, while at the motel. As she layers her body with clothing, the sight of her bundled self makes her laugh to the point that she falls and knocks over a can of hair spray. The can careens out of control and ends up shattering the mirror and part of the shower glass. Later, when Oedipa enters the bathroom, she fears that her reflection has disappeared because she, in her drunken state, has forgotten that the mirror was broken. Oedipa's connection to herself, the Narcissistic link to self as is represented in a reflection, has shattered and lies in fragments upon the motel floor. The shattered mirror is symbolic of the broken hold on life and self which Oedipa held previously. The closed system is indeed entropic and Oedipa must learn that she cannot rely on the reflection of her old knowledge of life to save her from searching deeper and uncovering the fragments which may or may not hold significance. In the postmodern world of Pynchon, you never know in what to believe.

Oedipa suggests that she will uncover a system entitled The Trystero beginning after her night of infidelity with Metzger. What bothered her most was how logically that night fit into her own escape from the tower. Many of the clues would come through Pierce's stamp collection, but strange things had already started to happen. On the envelope of a letter Mucho sent Oedipa, a typo caught her eye. She had not told him about her affair because she figured he would know, just as she had known about his many flings with high school girls. So, she had looked more closely at the envelope than the letter and found that it spelled Postmaster as Potsmaster. Metzger dismissed it but Oedipa could not.

That night, they went to a bar near Yoyodyne called The Scope where the electronics assembly people hung out. At the bar, they met a man named Mike Fallopian, who spoke to them about the Peter Pinguid Society. Pinguid had been a commanding officer for the Confederacy, who, in 1863, had led a ship to attack San Francisco where he was met with a Russian fleet. They faced off but nothing happened until March 9, 1864 when each ship disappeared from the sight of the other. Pinguid, against industrialization, remained disloyal to Lincoln and the Czar and so resigned his commission. Fallopian's story was interrupted by a call for the underground mail that used Yoyodyne's inter-office delivery. As he ran to get his mail, Oedipa visited the bathroom and saw a strange horn symbol on the wall with a message asking for response through WASTE. She was confused. When she returned, Fallopian mentioned that he was writing a book on the link between the postal reform movement and the Civil War.

One day, as Oedipa and Metzger waited to gain representatives for Pierce's far flung estate, they took a picnic to Pierce's project, Fangoso Lagoons. The Paranoids accompanied them. Large houses filled the neighborhood and in the center sat Lake Inverarity, with a small island housing the social hall. Oedipa instantly loved the building's art nouveau look. The Paranoids suggested they steal a boat from the marina and take a cruise. Metzger closed his eyes in case a lawyer was needed later. Before they could leave with the boat, a man popped up and asked Baby Igor for help. The man was Manny Di Presso, dressed in a skin-diving suit and hiding under a blue tarp. He was a lawyer turned actor who played Metzger in a TV pilot but had returned to being a lawyer since no one had bought the pilot. He was running from one of his clients, Tony Jaguar, who was involved with a crime family, Cosa Nostra.

They boated out to the social house and sat on the roof. Di Presso explained that he was bringing suit against the Inverarity estate about the bones that lay at the bottom of the lake for which Pierce may never have paid. Jaguar was now trying to borrow money from Di Presso because the lawyer refused to get an advance against the settlement. The bones came from Italy after a World War II battle where dead Americans were dumped into a lake. The Paranoids claimed that the story sounded curiously like a scene in the play, The Courier's Tragedy by Richard Wharfinger. Di Presso noticed that he was being pursued and ran off, taking their boat. The group was marooned until the Fangoso Security Force noticed their lit cigarettes.

The next day, Oedipa talked Metzger into seeing The Courier's Tragedy, which was being performed in San Narciso. The Jacobean revenge play sucked Oedipa in and set up an elaborate plot over five acts. Before the play began, the good Duke had kissed the poisoned feet of Saint Narcissus and died. His murderer, Duke Angelo, was in cahoots with the illegitimate son of the good Duke, Pasquale, who acted as regent for the birth son, Niccolò, after the good Duke's death. They plot to kill Niccolò but the boy is saved by the dissident henchman, Ercole. Niccolò grows up and hides on Angelo's court as a special courier for the Thurn and Taxis family, hoping to avenge his father. Angelo, however, refuses to use any but his own couriers. When Niccolò's friend tries to turn Niccolò in, he is stopped by Ercole, however not before leaving a blood message revealing Niccolò's identity.

There is a coup in Pasquale's dukedom and Angelo panics, deciding to use the alternate courier since he no longer trusts his own men. Niccolò is sent to bring a message to Gennaro, the leader of the rebellion. During Niccolò's passage, Angelo finds the message revealing his identity and sends henchman to kill Niccolò. When Gennaro's men find Niccolò, he is dead but the letter he was carrying has transformed into an explanation of the past secrets and events. One secret is that the ink used for the letter is from the bones of the good Duke's lost guards who were murdered by Angelo and thrown into the lake. Apparently, Niccolò had set his tryst with Tristero, a word which silenced the stage and affected Oedipa. Surrounding this plot, the play was filled with frequent and multiple forms of violence as well as sexually explicit scenes, exploring orgies and incest.

After the play ended, Metzger was ready to leave but Oedipa wanted to ask Driblette, the director, some questions. Metzger mocked her sense of investigative duty. He ranted loudly that he was too old for this feminist, liberated sense of justice. Oedipa, embarrassed, tried to explain but Metzger decided to wait in the car. Oedipa found her way back to the man dressed as Gennaro because Driblette had played the hero. Driblette began by telling her that the play was simply for entertainment. She still wondered why he had made the choices he did, especially the decision to have the cast share knowing looks when Tristero was mentioned. Oedipa wanted to see the original manuscript but Driblette had lost his copy. He got in the shower but she continued to ask about Tristero. Driblette claimed that it was simply his job to make choices. As Oedipa left for the parking lot, she realized she had forgotten to ask about the bones. She wondered if her mistake was accidental. On the drive back, the DJ broadcast on the radio was Oedipa's own Mucho Maas.

Chapter 3 Analysis:

Chapter Three is a chapter of curious new characters, curious coincidences, and curious subplots within the main plot. As Oedipa tells the reader at the start of the chapter, "Things then did not delay in turning curious." She too is becoming aware of the events which are occurring around her and is willing to see some kind of connection or, at least, curiosity between them. This journey of Oedipa's to determine and signify connection will constantly contrast with her perpetual feeling of inner entrapment. If there is no escape, as her revelation in front of Varo's painting made evident, from the tower that is the tapestry that is the world, then is Oedipa wrong to search for new links and connections within the world? Would not they simply be part of her own world? The protagonist's desire to search for new information, on the one hand, while revealing, on the other, that she is trapped within a closed system establishes a paradigm for reading the novel which is very close to the reader's own approach to the material. The notion, indeed, forces the work's own textuality and book form into question, asking the reader to consider every man's search for meaning in a world Pynchon may have identified as becoming more and more homogeneous and closed. Is the search of meaning and analysis then a fruitless attempt to grant significance to a increasingly gray ash type of modern society or is the only escape in a system which is decreasingly transmitting communication to forge new, alternate means of informing and differentiating human beings? These questions are all raised and left unanswered by Pynchon.

Tristero is the key word, standing as a synecdoche for the mystery and hints of revelation that lie within Oedipa's hunt. Although we have no idea what to make of the term, it is introduced in the first paragraph of the chapter nevertheless. Pynchon's manner of relating known future events back to the reader in a way that defies proper relations of time is comparable to the writing of Henry James. As David Seed has suggested, " Pynchon constantly draws back from attributing too definite an awareness to Oedipa. The Jamesian periphrastic tenses ('was to label,' 'would come to haunt.' etc.) suggest a knowledge of subsequent event." By taking a past, knowing stance while introducing the Tristero, Pynchon endows the term with suspicion and foreshadowing. The sense of revelation that Oedipa will undergo leads the reader to also endow the term with significance as we are told that Oedipa has several objects behind her discovery of the Tristero system. We feel that our search is to uncover the truth that Oedipa has sought and to find if the objects that lie behind her search will free Oedipa from her tower. We also must wonder if the suspicion and significance suggested may be empty in the end.

The reader gets an inkling of the suspicious nature with which Oedipa is beginning to regard her surroundings when Oedipa notices the misspelling on the envelope of Mucho's letter. This letter also gives the reader the opportunity to learn more of Oedipa's married life. It seems neither care too much if affairs are had, a situation which is a metaphor for the breakdown of traditional unity and communication in the novel. Accordingly, Oedipa does not pay much attention to the letter, the vehicle for communication, but instead inspects the envelope, the shield of communication. The "Potsmaster" misspelling foreshadows the alternate, covert paths of mail carriage that will be revealed in the next scene at the Scope bar.

The envelope incident continues directly into to the bar scene, leading the reader to connect the two events. Life at Echo Courts, we are told, would become overly quiet at times, causing Oedipa to try to escape the existence she was inhabiting. Her desire to escape is reminiscent of her tower. Pynchon's mention of "the stillness of the pool" relates directly to the allusion of the myth of Narcissus and the idea of the closed system. As Oedipa's humdrum life is reflected objectively back to her, she feels herself being drawn in. Though she leaves the hotel, the reader must wonder if her search takes her further from herself or further inside of herself. Pynchon's theme of entropy would suggest that each is a parallel path, as every system in modern society moves toward a patterned, homogeneity.

Subsequently, at the Scope, Oedipa and Metzger encounter what seems like a different world but they are very shortly drawn in. The sign on the wall above the words WASTE along with the delivery of the PPS mail are Oedipa's first real clues that alternate forms of communication are operating underneath the official surface. Yet as with many of Pynchon's symbols, the image of covert communication is coupled with its binary opposite. As Frank Palmeri deciphers, "The muted post horn, emblem of dispossession, renounces authorized channels of communication. Tristero communicates only through alteration of licensed signals, through parody or strategic silences." Moreover, Fallopian tells us that the mail passed through PPS is often trivial and forced, symbolizing the futility of alternate systems. The entire idea of waste is concurrent with Pynchon's theme of excluded middles, in this sense, where the gray ash of life is often tossed away in order to hold onto the overly extreme binaries. A consumer society disposes and dispossesses more of life than it keeps. Still, at this point in the novel, the link between Tristero and the WASTE symbol or the PPS system has not been substantiated.

Oedipa's conjecture and growing suspicion is solidified, though, by the character of Mike Fallopian. As for Fallopian's name, critics view this reference to a woman's sexual organs, along with character Stanley Koteks's name, as representative of Pynchon's theme of transsexuality. One must also accredit the possibility that Pynchon was again providing empty signifiers. Fallopian is more important to the reader because of his information on PPS as well as the book he is writing on the postal reform movement than he is for any metaphor for transsexuality. The view of history Fallopian gives, through the Peter Pinguid society, is closed and mixes reality with fiction. It is a metonym for how to look at the entire story. The coincidences mount when Manny Di Presso is introduced and the story of the bones is revealed. The consumerism involved with the selling of human bones to a factory for the production of charcoal touches on the theme of entropy. The exchange of life and energy undertaken in the process symbolizes the closed system of humanity. Di Presso himself is a metaphor for the materialism inherent in such an action as he is a lawyer turned actor turned lawyer. As Metzger is the inverse, the reader gets the feeling that one is the same. That the bones of American soldiers are not only part of American consumerism but also part of a play being performed in San Narciso is of no surprise.

Of course the play mentioned, aptly by the Paranoids, refers back to the mystery of alternate mail systems. "The Courier's Tragedy" takes up a substantial amount of chapter three. There is no need to analyze the entire play but we can look at how the plot of the play parallels the plot of the novel. As critics have noted, much as "Mousetrap", the play within Hamlet, provided a synchronous plot and furthered the pace of Shakespeare's work, "The Courier's Tragedy" acts to quicken Oedipa's suspicion and paranoia concerning the Tristero. As Grant relates, "...there can be no doubt that many readers have found the world of the Crying of Lot 49 every bit as labyrinthine as Wharfinger's 'landscape of evil.'" As in the novel, an allusion to Narcissus is made in the play, as the good Duke is poisoned when he kisses the feet of Saint Narcissus. Self-love is paralyzing. Also, the predominance of incest within the play parallels Mucho's mention of the "convoluted incest" of the used car lot. Incest is, by definition, a product of a closed system of connection, or intercourse.

The bones do arise in act IV as we learn that they are the remains of the lost soldiers and have been used to make a evil, magical ink. Symbolically, the play tells us that waste (WASTE), the remains of life, has been made significant through the power of words and communication. Moreover, a direct parallel to the novel lies in Pynchon's words, or Oedipa's thoughts, as she describes a turn in the play. She notes, "It is about this point in the play...that things really get peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words. Heretofore the naming of names has gone on either literally or as a metaphor. But now...[c]ertain things, it is made clear, will not be spoke aloud..." The ambiguity of the plot and thematic structure of the novel is highlighted, along with the power and chill behind the employment of language. The mode presented is intertextual and explicitly defines the ultra implicit manner of the text of the novel.

Driblette, the director, is asked by Oedipa to explain why he has chosen the Tristero to be the ultimate vehicle for mystery and suspense in the play. Paralleling the treatment the term is given in the play, Tristero takes on an exceptional, though unknown, meaning to Oedipa. Ironically, though Driblette tries to persuade Oedipa that he must make choices as a director and the treatment of Tristero was one of these choices, she cannot get over the word. He explains that the play was not Shakespeare and was meant only for entertainment. Some have suggested that Driblette stands as Pynchon's voice within the novel, ultimately notifying the reader that they should not read too deeply.

However, Pynchon's treatment of Driblette's character leads most to disagree. Driblette is another metaphor for the idea of human waste in a society of consumption and dispossession. His very name recalls a sense of blahness; he plays the character of Gennaro in the play, who is tagged the "colorless administrator." Likewise, his costume is the color gray, linking the gray ash mourned by Mucho and foreshadowing the theme of "excluded middles" later mentioned by Oedipa. Driblette does little to satisfy Oedipa's suspicions because he "had managed to create around [the Tristero] the same aura of ritual reluctance here, offstage, as he had on." Oedipa decides that she not had asked about the Tristero instead of the bones by accident, but was meant to. Thus, even Oedipa's air has taken on the ritual reluctance with which Pynchon slowly suffocates the reader.

Everything Oedipa was witness to seemed to lead to the Tristero. She read over the will more closely and decided to bring it life, as it seemed Pierce wanted. She visited a stockholders meeting at Yoyodyne, sat through their songfest, and then tagged along on the tour. Somehow, she became lost. She wandered until meeting Stanley Koteks, a young worker. As first glance, she noticed him drawing the WASTE symbol but he quickly tucked the envelope away. On hearing that Oedipa was a stockholder, Stanley hoped she could enact a change for him concerning Yoyodyne's patenting rules. Engineers at the company had to sign away patent rights for inventions and Stanley felt stifled. He explained how one inventor, John Nefastis, was an inventor who had escaped this fate and created Maxwell's Demon, an object which could sort fast and slow molecules to drive a heat engine by staring at the picture of Clerk Maxwell. Only sensitives had been successful at working the machine. Oedipa wanted to try so Stanley gave her a box number where she could reach Nefastis before realizing he had made a mistake. He had given her a WASTE address and Oedipa asked about it. However, she pronounced the acronym as a word and gave away her ignorance on the subject. He would no longer help her.

Oedipa asked Mike Fallopian about her suspicions. He confirmed that Koteks was probably part of some underground system. Another clue which came to Oedipa was the bronze historical marker on the lake at Fangoso Lagoons. The inscription related the massacre of Wells, Fargo men by masked marauders as told by the sole witness, a post rider, and a cross traced in the dust by one victim. Oedipa immediately wondered if the cross had been a T for Tristero, as in the play. She tried calling Driblette but did not reach him so she went to Zapf's bookstores to find the collection of plays. Zapf mentioned how popular the book had been recently. Oedipa turned to the one mention of Tristero and saw a handwritten note giving a variant edition. Looking at the preface, Oedipa remarked that the original hardcover was a textbook published in Berkeley. She called the L.A. Library to look for it but then decided to check the publishers so she could visit Nefastis as well.

Continuing with her obsession to track Pierce's estate, Oedipa traveled to a senior citizens home that Pierce had constructed. The one man who spoke to her was ninety-one and told her about his grandfather at the same age. His grandfather had ridden for the Pony Express. Oedipa asked if he ever fought off marauders and the old man answered that his grandfather loved killing Indians and Indians who weren't Indians. These pretend Indians wore a black feather and rode at night. To remember their Spanish name, the old man took out a ring his grandfather had cut off the finger of a marauder. The ring contained the WASTE symbol. Oedipa again tracked down Fallopian, telling him of the marker and the old man's ring. He thought it was a correlation but one too difficult to decipher.

The next connection came from a philatelist, Genghis Cohen, to whom Metzger had sent Pierce's stamp collection. Oedipa received a call from Cohen asking her to look at irregularities. Instantly, Oedipa understood that the stamps and Cohen may lead her to information on private mail carriers. Cohen gave Oedipa a glass of wine made from dandelions which he had picked from a cometary now cleared for the East San Narciso Freeway. The connection to the graveyards plowed by Pierce was unmistakable. Oedipa felt lost in a maze of connections. Cohen showed her the watermark on a stamp from a 1940 Pony Express issue which revealed the WASTE sign. Cohen did not recognize it. He then pointed out a Thurn and Taxis legend on a German stamp. In the corners of the stamp stood a horn with a single loop. The WASTE symbol differed because of the extra loop, likely a mute, Cohen suggested. Cohen also mentioned that the reverse side of the Pony Express stamps had the obvious mistake of an engraved black feather and the transposition, "U.S. Potsage." After Oedipa told Cohen what she knew of these markings, he concluded that whatever the postal fraud was, its members were still active. She asked if they should tell the government. He said no and was not open to other questions. It seemed to Oedipa that almost everything in Pierce's world had been overturned for the Tristero, whatever it was.

Chapter 4 Analysis:

In chapter four, the discovery of coincidence picks up speed and the intensity of the search picks up urgency. Oedipa begins to view herself as analogous to Driblette, a type of projector of worlds, using the will as her script. The metaphor of Oedipa as director brings into question her role as protagonist and hero of the novel. By Oedipa wanting to project a world and its constellations, Pynchon implies that Oedipa will be controlling the outcome, the product, of her production. Yet the following pages seem to infer that Oedipa is being controlled or, at least, that the events Oedipa participates in are beyond her control. This point foreshadows the inner conflict Oedipa will work unsuccessfully to solve. In later chapters, Oedipa will be overcome with doubts, questioning her own sanity as well as questioning a world in which the type of system she seems to have uncovered could operate.

The metaphor of Oedipa as director conflicting with the metaphor of the Tristero as the director of Oedipa functions to create a synecdoche for the types of driving metaphors which are enforced throughout the novel. Oedipa wonders from the first time she meets Metzger if she has been set up and if she is on the set of a performance. Her fears are slightly validated when we learn that Metzger was, in fact, an actor but is now a lawyer. Manny Di Presso arises as the lawyer turned actor turned lawyer. Roseman, Oedipa's lawyer in Kinneret, is continually writing a script to combat Perry Mason, a T.V. show character. As critic, N. Katherine Hayles, confirms, "The construction hints that the legal world Oedipa entered when she was named executrix of Pierce's will is not a clear-cut world of fact. Rather it is a twilight zone..." Thus, many of the characters to whom Oedipa has looked to for truth, information, validation, or advice find themselves unable to separate their reality from the surreality of performance and of Hollywood. Oedipa then views a play which strangely echoes many of the same themes which she has discovered in her search, most namely the notion of ritual reluctance, on the implicit level, and the malignant use of bones, on the physical level.

As the blurring between reality and fiction increases, Oedipa begins to see herself in a role, Driblette' role of director. Driblette thus is never heard from again as his role has been usurped and Oedipa has taken on the function of projection for herself. Critic, Hayles adds, "Like the tapestry the imprisoned maidens weave, the world [Driblette] projects has no external referent other than the inexplicable workings of his mind. The connection proves to be fragile as it is mysterious, for Driblette later disappears into the Pacific Ocean..." His strange disappearance irks Oedipa and she will later wonder if maybe they were even in love, although they met for only ten minutes. The intense attachment between the two characters, and the confusion between the literal and metaphorical levels, therefore blurs as well.

After attending the Yoyodyne stockholders' meeting, Oedipa takes the tour of the plant but becomes lost. The incident would be benign but Oedipa quickly panics because of the blank faces looking at her. The inside of the plant, thus, parallels the bland, homogeneous outside which Oedipa viewed when entering San Narciso. The entire city is reflected in the blank worker's faces, making the environment inside Yoyodyne a synecdoche for the entire world Pierce has constructed. Remember that when Oedipa entered the city, it reminded her of the "unexpected, astonishing clarity [of] the [transistor radio] circuit card..." This ordered, yet shocking and seemingly "hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning" stares back at her through the synecdochal faces of the Yoyodyne workers, thus sending her into a panic that would be irrational without the suspicion that had been pulling at Oedipa and growing since that day she drove toward the city.

Stanley Koteks is the one employee Oedipa speaks with at Yoyodyne. He strikes her as different immediately because of the WASTE symbol she sees him drawing and likely because of the bitterness he embodies. His inner conflict is a metaphor for the conflict which will grow inside Oedipa and foreshadows the point when she will think she is pregnant with the horror of Tristero. We realize that the last name of Koteks as well as the last name of Fallopian, relating to female reproduction, are symbolic of this monstrous faux pregnancy which will later haunt Oedipa. She will became pregnant with a knowledge neither desired nor understood.

At this point, however, Koteks feeds Oedipa an urgency to search and learn about WASTE. His slip up concerning the WASTE address allows her to gain information on John Nefastis, a man whom has escaped the ordered sameness of Yoyodyne. In Maxwell's Demon, Nefastis created a machine which works directly with Pynchon's theme of entropy. The main mission of the machine is to sort high speed and low speed molecules without work, thus bypassing the second law of Thermodynamics. As Oedipa questions, is not sorting work? Although Koteks replies that mental work is not work in a Thermodynamics sense, engineers stress that the functional definition of work in that sense remains uncertain. Still, Oedipa wishes to check out the invention for herself and to see if she is a "sensitive" who has the power to move the piston and begin the Demon's mental work.

If she succeeds, the sorting would actually preserve a world, which unlike all other closed systems, would not move toward entropy because of an ability to remain heterogeneous. By dividing the two types of molecules into different compartments so that heat is created and maintained, the molecules do not have a chance to share properties until an equilibrium is reached. As Grant comments, " 'Sorting,' therefore, becomes an absolutely central metaphor, and the fact that Oedipa singles this concept out for objection is an indication of her intuitive grasp of her own predicament." Oedipa informs Koteks that he should not look at sorting as only mental work, and gives the sorting done by postal workers as an example. She is able to perceive that sorting between the poles of a dichotomy is not a cut and dry process, touching on the theme of excluded middles.

Oedipa's continuing need to encounter more of Pierce's property leads her to the nursing home where she meets Mr. Thoth. The name Thoth is an allusion to the idea of hieroglyphics and encoded ancient processes. As critic, Robert D. Newman, emphasizes, "Mr. Thoth, named for the Egyptian god of scribes, resides in a nursing home and, like the state of the written word, decays." Further stretching Pynchon's elusive, though thematic, postmodern metametaphor for the significance of language, Thoth starts immediately into a mode of storytelling which is little preserved in the modern world but slips occasionally into a Porky Pig cartoon and is unable to distinguish between the reality of each. The reader must wonder at the veracity of Oedipa's sources as the ninety-one year old man speaks of the stories his ninety-one year old grandfather had shared with him. Yet the non-Indian marauders clothed in black mentioned in the story directly parallel the henchmen in Driblette's production and the dark riders who disrupted the Wells, Fargo men of the Fangoso Lagoons marker. As critic, Bernard Duyfhuizen, concludes, "The repetition of identical plot elements in stories placed in widely divergent contexts sets up an uncanny sense on coincidence, yet in COL 49 the fine line between randomness and pattern is always under question." History is at once confused with metaphor and fiction and language.

The last character Oedipa encounters in the chapter is the philatelist, Genghis Cohen. Pynchon has admitted publicly that Cohen's name was simply a pun for the Mongol warrior, Genghis Khan. It appears that he did not mean for the reader to look into why this specific character was named after the warrior, perhaps only for the irony of a character who seems rather meek garnering such an allusion. However, Cohen does bring Oedipa to a new frontier of her search by supplying her with solid evidence. First, he offers her dandelion wine which symbolically parallels the bones which were dug up by Pierce as he cleared graveyards for a freeway. Some critics suggest that the living qualities of the wine, fermenting in spring and clearing in fall, symbolizes the remnants of himself that Pierce has left behind, foreshadowing Oedipa's later sense that Pierce may have wanted to beat death through the will and the Tristero.

Furthermore, many of Pierce's stamps, from Pony Express editions to German stamps, show signs of being Tristero forgeries. The post horn emblem is displayed on the stamps as well as the black feather which Thoth had referred to and another misspelling, "potsage." As the misspelling "Potsmaster" was symbolic of the corruption and decay of the normal transfer of communication, so to is the corruption of Pierce's stamps. However, Oedipa is also able to view the correct Thurn and Taxis symbol on a stamp. It is similar to the WASTE sign but missing a loop. Cohen's realization that the extra loop is a mute allows the reader to make the symbolic connection between the WASTE symbol and the breakdown of communication Pynchon signifies. Oedipa tells Cohen all of her evidence and we begin to get a sense of the totality of the closed system in which she is working and attempting to decipher. The more patterned the clues seem to become, the more frazzled Oedipa becomes. Perhaps the Demon is dividing the molecules of Pynchon's writing into a telling binary as well.

Instead of contacting Driblette, Oedipa drove to Berkeley. Metzger was dispassionate about her leaving. When she arrived late at night, she pulled into a German looking hotel with a sign welcoming an American Deaf-Mute Assembly. She was shown her room and she fell into an anxious asleep. Oedipa found the Lecturn Press office in the morning but it did not carry Wharfinger's play. The employees sent her to a warehouse in Oakland where she finally picked up the collection. Looking for the line containing "Trystero," Oedipa was dumbfounded to arrive at a different word even though her paperback edition was supposed a direct reprint of the older copy she held. The footnote stated that other editions had different variants of the line, one being a pun for the Trystero. But, there was no mention of whatever version the her paperback must be.

The preface was written by a Professor Emory Bortz from UC Berkeley. Oedipa drove to the campus only to realize that many years had passed since his preface of 1957; she was told that he was now a professor at San Narciso College. Leaving the campus, she mused over the differences in atmosphere from her temperate days at college. Next, Oedipa drove to John Nefastis' home and introduced herself as an acquaintance of Koteks'. She mentioned that she wanted to see if she was a sensitive. He showed her the Demon. Nefastis explained the two theories of entropy, heat-engines and communication, which were united within the invention. When Oedipa did not understand, he stressed that entropy was a metaphor to connect thermodynamics to information flow. Then, Nefastis allowed Oedipa to try to work the machine while he watched cartoons. She stared at the Demon through many cartoons but could not make the piston move, though at one point, she thought it might be starting. Frustrated, Oedipa finally gave up and Nefastis comforted her, telling her they could have sex on the couch. Oedipa quickly ran away. Driving without purpose, Oedipa realized that she was heading toward San Francisco in rush hour. Strangely, the hectic rush calmed her. She told herself that she would go with the flow in San Francisco, looking for nothing, and hopefully escape from the maze in which she was entangled.

However, within an hour, Oedipa saw a muted post horn. Walking along the streets, Arnold Snarb, a tourist, had pinned his ID badge on Oedipa. She was suddenly among a group of tourists who moved into a gay bar, The Greek Way. Oedipa was pushed in and given a drink. The man she stood next to had on a different badge, one with the muted post horn symbol. Oedipa tried mentioning that she was from Thurn and Taxis but the man did not understand. She directly asked about his pin but he told her nothing until Oedipa admitted that she needed help. She told him everything she knew. He had heard only of Kirby, the code name from the Scope's bathroom wall. He told Oedipa that his pin meant he was a member of Inamorati Anonymous, an organization for isolated individuals against love. The symbol originated with a fired member of Yoyodyne who had wanted to kill himself but could not decide to do it for weeks. He received a stack of letters from others who wanted to commit suicide but never did in response to an ad he placed. All contained the muted horn on the stamp. The man realized this in an attempt to douse himself with gas and burn to death. At that time, he recognized that love was his weakness and that he would start an organization for others who wished to isolate themselves from it. The horn became the sign.

After the helpful man left, Oedipa felt drunk and alone. The rest of the night, she wandered the streets of San Francisco, locating the Tristero symbol everywhere. She saw it in chalk on the street, like part of a children's game, and on a Chinese herbalist's window. She felt that she was meant to see and remember every sign. She was safe. In Golden Gate Park, she saw a circle of children who knew of the chalk game. Oedipa wandered into a Mexican diner and found Jesús Arrabal, an anarchist she and Pierce had met in Mazatlán. Jesús had been amazed by Pierce's total oligarchism. Lying near him was an old anarchist paper with an handstruck image of the post horn. Jesús could tell her nothing about it. On a bus, Oedipa noticed a scratched image of the post horn on the back of a seat with "DEATH" penciled near it, standing for "Don't ever antagonize the horn." She found the symbol in a laundromat and she heard a mother at the airport asking her son to write by WASTE. Each sign beat her up more than the last. She would later wonder how many times she had dreamt the horn. It seemed that every underground used WASTE to subvert the government.

Near morning, Oedipa spied a shaking old man, with the horn tattooed on his hand, in a stairwell. He told her that he had left his wife years ago in Fresno and wanted Oedipa to drop a letter for her in a WASTE box. She inquired where it was and he replied that the box was under the freeway. He crumpled against her, causing Oedipa to feel helpless. A man from the rooming house came out to claim the old man. Before leaving, Oedipa promised to mail the letter. Musing on the old man's DT's from alcohol withdrawal and the dt's of calculus, she traversed the underside of the freeway for an hour before she saw a can that matched. Oedipa dropped the letter in and then followed the carrier who later picked up the WASTE mail. Ironically, she followed him around the city and back to the home of John Nefastis.

Finally, returning to the hotel, she entered a lobby full of deaf-mute delegates. She was pulled into a silent ballroom where, amazingly, no one collided for the half hour that Oedipa danced. She then fled to her room and slept. In the morning, Oedipa drove to Kinneret, deciding to stop first at the office of Dr. Hilarius. She hoped he would tell her that WASTE was a delusion. As she walked toward his office, a bullet flew by her head. She ran into the building and was told by the nurse, Helga Blamm, that Hilarius had gone crazy and thought that terrorists were after him. Oedipa noticed that an escape was possible through a window but Helga explained that Hilarius may need someone. Since she had been away, Oedipa offered to try to talk to him. The Doctor spoke of his efforts to remain loyal to Freud and the especially evil face he could make. As sirens neared, he pulled Oedipa into the room. The truth of Hilarius' past was revealed, including the experiments he had practiced on Jews for the Nazis in Buchenwald. He was now overcome with paranoia that he would have face his crimes. The cops hoped Oedipa could hold Hilarius long enough for TV coverage. Finally, she got a hold of the gun and the cops came in.

Oedipa left the office and discovered Mucho, in the driveway covering the story. He interviewed her for KCUF and, then, they drove to the station so Mucho could edit the tapes. Funch told Oedipa that he was glad she was back so she could hopefully help Mucho stop losing his identity. Oedipa did not understand until she and Mucho went for pizza. At the pizzeria, Mucho commented that he had known about Metzger but also knew that their affair was over. In the middle of their conversation, Mucho stopped to listen to the many levels of Muzak he could decipher. He talked about the seventeen violins used and how every voice, when saying the same words, was the same. Each individual, he claimed delightfully, was really a chorus of everyone. Oedipa was alarmed. When he took out a bottle of LSD pills from Hilarius' study, she understood. The study had been expanded it for husbands. Mucho loved that his nightmares about the car lot had stopped and that his senses were so attuned to the world. Oedipa knew she had lost her Mucho. He offered her the pills but Oedipa refused them. She was going back to San Narciso even though the cops had told her to remain in Kinneret for the investigation.

Chapter 5 Analysis:

The confusion surrounding the line of Trystero in Wharfinger's play comes to a head when Oedipa tracks down an original copy of the book and finds only reference to a variant that had a pun of Trystero. No versions are mentioned as having the actual word, such as the versions Oedipa and Driblette had contained. The suspicions surrounding the Tristero thus become problems of text, language, and punning. These changes foreshadow the information Oedipa learns when Professor Bortz tells her that Driblette did not speak the line about Tristero on the night he attended. The language of performance and of Tristero then is used not just as the words on a page but as windows into a meaning beyond the page. Oedipa's inability to track down Bortz at UC Berkeley is thus symbolic of the variants in language and Pynchon's belief that no singular central meaning can be pinned on the words of language. He is not available at the location where he wrote about The Courier's Tragedy because, like the language employed within the play, his existence is not stable but fluctuates with the flow of time and information.

Oedipa's meeting with Nefastis highlights one of Pynchon's largest themes. Nefastis has created a machine which attempts to replicate and bring to life Maxwell's Demon. When Oedipa does not understand the complexities of the theory, he breaks the idea down by saying that entropy is a metaphor: "It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The machine uses both." Critics such as Frank Kermode believe that the Demon is actually even larger than that. Perhaps the machine is a metaphor for the entire novel and the process of reading a novel. Oedipa is searching and sorting, physically and mentally, hoping to classify the clues which manifest in her life but she cannot make the piston move, a metaphor for the inability to find a central truth. However, as Kermode details, "But if you make the eyes of this novel move, or if you believe in the original plot on which it depends, you risk a kind of madness, which is the ultimate human cost of holding everything together in a single design." This is the madness we risk as readers whenever we apply a critical approach in which we are designating meaning or dissecting significance.

This idea or skepticism of search dominates the novel and Oedipa's quest. In the information age in which Oedipa and the reader live, information is dispensed in such a rapid overwhelming manner that one must sort through the waste to see if a truth lies within. Thematically, Pynchon employs WASTE, symbolic of the waste of a consumption society, and the theory of entropy as the metaphors to illustrate the job of sorting through information and having to decide what is worth valuing. As critic, Tony Tanner, confirms, "But it is true that in one form or another Œcommunication' is the key, and Oedipa - demonically or not - will have to go on "sorting" out the clues (molecules), trying to discover which information really works against entropy as opposed to the kind of noninformation ("newsless" letters) that effectively accelerates it." Oedipa feels constantly on the edge of revelation, but never within a state of revelation. She is, instead, in the process of deciphering to which levels of understanding her knowledge and vocabulary apply in the modern world. The Demon is Nefastis' attempt, and Pynchon's parody, to bridge the gap which exists between the dichotomous ends of the metaphor, between the literal and metaphorical, which, tellingly and ironically, ends only in Nefastis' hope that Oedipa will have sex with him in front of the TV. The cartoons he is watching were foreshadowed by the confusion Mr. Thoth had separating his reality from Porky Pig. One must wonder at veracity of Nefastis's truth as well. The TV, as foreshadowed by the dead green eye expressed in chapter one, is another symbol of empty communication.

Not surprisingly, Oedipa feels calmer in the freeway madness she drives into leaving Nefastis' home than she had in the silent, stagnant city of San Narciso. As Grant describes, "The regularity of the calm pool surface and of the streets of San Narciso reflects an ordering process that has gone too far...The freeway...does evince a degree of chaotic vitality, [and] provides a more stimulating and therefore thought-provoking environment." The stagnating quality of ultimate chaos within a closed system, as is implied by the thermodynamic form of entropy, is also echoed in Koteks' cry for help as well as in the multitude of voice Mucho hears at the end of the chapter, showing how information theory entropy comes into play. Still, Oedipa briefly escapes the blandness, as she had hoped to do with Pierce in Mexico City, by entering an environment filled with human involvement and vitality. The night is spent drifting through the streets of San Francisco where, ironically, she is inundated with the sights and sounds of a Tristero she had rarely heard of a week earlier.

The most touching episode of the night comes when she meets an elderly man shaking in a stairwell outside a rooming house. This is one of the only times we hear of Oedipa making physical contact with another human, besides the footsie with Roseman and the experience with Metzger --both times when she was, physically and symbolically, very insulated from her own reality. With this man, she feels her breast get wet and notices that the old man is crying against her. Feeling motherly, she has reached out to him. The crying is an allusion to the tears Oedipa cried behind her green bubble glasses while staring at the Varos painting in Mexico City. There, she had realized she could not escape the tower of tedium she had created. A similar scene is recreated as we enter an enclosed, dark stairwell leading to an upstairs room which Oedipa immediately dreads. This time, however, she is climbing the stairs to a man who has reached out to her with his Tristero tattoo, in contrast to the Rapunzel metaphor Oedipa spins around Pierce. As he cries, the same helpless feeling hits Oedipa as the time she had cried and, in a parallel moment, she tells the man that she cannot help. Oedipa has made intimate contact and gained significant knowledge on the Tristero in the form of an actual mailbox. However, she is struck by the feeling that this knowledge does not allow her to break through the walls of communication and to save this man from the waste of society into which he has fallen, symbolized by the mattress he fits himself into as she leaves the rooming house. She knows that he will die regardless of her actions.

Similarly, Oedipa follows the mail carrier for WASTE in a huge circle which brings her back to the home of Nefastis, symbolic of the labyrinthian but ultimately circular and ineffectual search for meaningful communication she has begun. WASTE brings her no further than her own means had taken her. She drives back to her hotel only to be swept into a ballroom full of deaf-mute couples. Ironically, a night filled by signs, symbols, and promises of communication ends in disrupted transmissions, a silent dance where the couples move simultaneously without collision. Oedipa is amazed at their feat but in many ways their dancing simply echoes the stagnation of San Narciso and the many unfulfilled, empty patterns she has uncovered. She runs from the ballroom paralleling her run from the home of the Demon machine.

Oedipa's return to Kinneret reveals a much different town than she had left. The two predominant men in her life have been changed completely, both because of newly felt delusions which have conquered their psyche. Ironically, and satirically, Mucho has seemingly benefited from the hallucinogenic drugs given dispensed by Hilarius, who himself has been overcome by delusions while still being sane enough to admit to Oedipa that she was smart to not take the LSD he provided in the experiment. Hilarius had "sounded like Pierce doing a Gestapo officer" when Oedipa received a three A.M. call from him in chapter one. In addition, the experiment had strangely been named the German title, Die Brücke. The irony of Pynchon's simile is realized later when Hilarius' past is revealed and we are told that he, in fact, worked for the Gestapo and experimented on Jews in concentration camps. The likely hyperbole of the first comparison is more humorous when Hilarius snaps with paranoia. Another irony, Oedipa had been coming to him that day because she hoped she was simply paranoid concerning the Tristero! Who then is there to ask?

Then Oedipa learns that her husband has had a virtual lobotomy thanks to the LSD dispensed by now paranoid Hilarius. He too suffers from delusions but of a pleasant kind in which he can hear the harmonies of every note of music and tone of voice. The muzak that followed Oedipa as background noise early in the novel, symbolic of her life's tedium, has taken over the life of Mucho, saved him from the nightmares of his past, and stripped him of his identity. A metaphor for the homogeneity that is hinted at the first sign of San Narciso when Oedipa compares it to a circuit card, Mucho loses the individuality which had allowed him to be attune to the gray middles and sadness of a society moving toward entropy and waste. Stripped of her shrink and husband, Oedipa moves toward the void of the excluded middles which will open in the final chapter.

Returning to Echo Courts, Oedipa learned, through song, that Metzger had run off to marry Serge's fifteen year old chick. Metzger had left her a note explaining the turn over of his executorship to another lawyer from his firm whom she would be hearing from shortly. Oedipa was surprised that there was no mention of their relationship but was too preoccupied to reflect on it. She called Driblette but was greeted by his mother saying that a lawyer would give a statement tomorrow. Oedipa was confused. She called the professor, Emory Bortz, and reached his wife who invited her over. On the drive over, Oedipa a passed rubble where Zapf's bookstore had stood. She learned at the government surplus outlet next door that Zapf had burned his store down for insurance. The owner of the outlet, Winthrop Tremaine, told her of the SS arm bands which were selling quickly at his store.

Back in the car, Oedipa was angered that she had not hit Tremaine. When she arrived, Bortz was surrounded by three graduate students, all drinking heavily. Oedipa first asked about the line containing Tristero in her version of The Courier's Tragedy. Bortz demanded to know how she got into the Vatican library and was astounded to see the paperback version she held. In the Vatican, a pornographic version of the play existed but he proclaimed that Driblette's version in his play was far from pornographic. Oedipa was then told that Driblette had walked into the ocean after he had struck the play's set. It turned out that the occasion for their gathering was his wake. Oedipa realized that her men were being stripped from her. She asked what lines Bortz had heard when he saw Driblette's production. He stated only the preceding couplet, explaining that Driblette had left the following couplet out. Oedipa mentioned that not only was the next couplet used when she saw the play, but Driblette had used the "Tristero" version from her paperback. Though the students and Bortz did not find it extraordinary that Driblette added lines at whim, Oedipa posited that Driblette had been trying to tell the audience something about his life.

Bortz showed her slides of the Vatican version, clarifying that experts believed the version to be a Scurvhamite project, an extreme Puritan gesture to damn the theater by changing the play's words. Tristero would have represented the "brute Other" who controlled the Scurvhamite universe. In response to Oedipa asking what the Tristero was, Bortz showed her a book which Wharfinger had used to learn about the marauders in Italy. The author, Blobb, had crossed a desolate section of Italy in a mail coach belonging to "Torre and Tassis." Black cloaked riders set upon the coach and brutalized all but Blobb and his companion who declared that they were English. Bortz believed that the Tristero wanted to spread its message to England, thus explaining why Blobb was saved and why the highwaymen warned the Brits in English to spread word of their wrath.

Oedipa looked into all that she had researched in order to create a history of the Tristero. According to her history, after a Calvinist take over in Brussels in 1577, the executor of Thurn and Taxis was replaced by Jan Hinckart. Hernando Joaquín de Tristero y Calavera, claiming to be Hinckart's cousin and the rightful heir to Thurn and Taxis, was jealous and fought a small guerrilla war versus Hinckart. When Hinckart's operation fell into debt, Tristero saw an opening to begin his own system. He cloaked his followers in black to symbolize his exile and led them in creating terror against Thurn and Taxis. He later added the muted horn and a dead badger to their symbolism.

The next day, Oedipa attended Driblette's burial. After hearing the eulogy, Oedipa sat on the ground and tried to communicate with Driblette, hoping he could tell her if his death was connected to the Tristero. She dreaded that the Tristero had removed Driblette as it had removed Mucho, Metzger, and Hilarius. She still needed Driblette. However, though she felt some penetration, Driblette did not speak to her. The libraries were of no further help to Oedipa. Bortz looked at every low period for Thurn and Taxis as an important time for Tristero. He felt that the rival to Thurn and Taxis was only first mentioned in the 1700s because Tristero had reached a point where they could not retaliate. Bortz fabricated scenarios of Tristero meetings and disagreements, such as possible union with Thurn and Taxis which was denied. He suggested, without sources, that they may have caused the French Revolution. Oedipa was beyond the point of following anything up. She did return to the Scope, however, and found Fallopian changed toward her as well. After listening to her update, he proposed that she write down her solid facts and consider whether Tristero was an Inverarity hoax. Oedipa had considered the possibility but refused to hear it and left the bar. She continued to avoid validating her sources. Cohen called her in to look an a new American stamp with a muted horn, badger, and WASTE defined as "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire." Cohen claimed to have received it from a friend and showed her an addendum pasted on to the American stamp catalog he had bought which spoke of the stamp. Looking at the back of the book, Oedipa noted that he had bought it at Zapf's. Suspicious, she later looked at Pierce's list of holdings and saw that he owned the strip that Zapf's had been in and the Tank Theatre where Courier's Tragedy was produced. Every clue to the Tristero also traced directly to Pierce's estate. She saw four alternatives which explained her mess: she had stumbled onto this real, alternative network; she had hallucinated the connections; an elaborate plot had been arranged against her; or she had fantasized a plot against her. She had reached a void, where no one could help her. Oedipa suffered greatly, tortured between oversleep and sleeplessness. At one point, she thought she was pregnant and gave Grace Bortz's name to the doctor. Cohen now called her frequently with new information, the greatest being a translation of an article describing a split in the ranks of the Tristero, causing a large number to flee to America in 1849, a very bad time because of the U.S. postal reforms. Bortz figured that they had organized with the Indians during the Civil War, supporting the story of the black feather bandits. Oedipa thought through all of the corrupted stamps she had come upon. Bortz suggested she check out the article's veracity but she did not.

Oedipa's toothaches and dreams grew worse and she realized that she was pregnant, but only with horror. Cohen called and told Oedipa that the stamps were set to be auctioned and would be sold under lot 49. A new and anonymous bidder had arranged to bid by book, thus not in person, which was peculiar and suspicious, Cohen alerted her. He suspected it may have to do with the Tristero. Back at her hotel, Oedipa drank bourbon until dark and then drove the highways with her headlights off, but nothing happened. Desperately, she called The Greek Way bar from a phone booth and gave a description of the man she had spoken to there. When he came to the phone, she pleaded with him to tell her if he had been asked to run into her and tell her his story of the muted horn. He replied it was too late and hung up. Oedipa looked around but could not orient herself. She felt lost, without boundaries, and began wandering along a railroad track. Meditating on her discoveries and Pierce's intentions, Oedipa decided that San Narciso had no boundaries. Pierce's legacy was America. He could have encrypted the Tristero in the will, Oedipa could be the mistress of his legacy, Pierce may have hoped to live past death as paranoia, or Oedipa might accidentally have discovered a conspiracy of subversion. She wondered how far the network of Tristero could stretch. She reflected on excluded middles and saw the world loom in front of her as a tapestry of binary zeros and ones. With nothing to lose, Oedipa called the agent of the mysterious bidder the next day. He would only tell her that his client had decided to appear at the auction in person. One the day of the auction, Oedipa arrived early and ran into Cohen, who apologized for his conflict of interests. He was very interested in bidding on some of the stamps. Cohen informed Oedipa that they, luckily, would have Loren Passerine as a crier. Oedipa wondered what she would do to the man who bid on lot 49. She sat in the back of the auction house alone and watched the proceedings begin.

Chapter 6 Analysis:

On Oedipa's ride to the home of Emory Bortz, she drives past the former Zapf's bookstore which has since been burned to the ground. The neighboring store, a government surplus outlet, is owned by Winthrop Tremaine. Tremaine's first response that Zapf was irresponsible because he could have burned down the entire strip of stores seems rational. However, we soon learn that Tremaine has been selling SS arm bands and plans to soon sell entire SS uniforms. When Oedipa asks if the arm bands are government surplus items, Tremaine gives her an "insider's wink." Why he trusts her with this knowledge is not apparent but the connection to Nazism is an extension of the demons who haunt Dr. Hilarius. And, parallel to the irony surrounding the shrink who is overcome by his own delusions, Tremaine's identity is filled with irony. Winthrop is one of the oldest names in America, originating from America's first puritan settlers. Tremaine can also be connected to an American past because of the book and television series, entitled Johnny Tremaine.

As critic Georgian M. Colville states, "Pynchon seems to want to create a link between Nazism and the fanatic early American Puritan persecution of Quakers, witches, Indians, and other Œheretics' and consequently the very foundation of America, which seems to be an important background element in the novel's tapestry." America as woven into the tapestry which surrounds Oedipa in the vision she discovers while staring at the Varos painting foreshadows her coming realization that the legacy Pierce has left her with includes all of America. This America contains a dirty past, contrasting with the idea that the new world is presently moving toward entropy but had been an independently active system previously. Perhaps, Pynchon is providing the alternate end to the binary in order to create a sense of doubt, or, in order to stress a sort of evolution from prejudicial persecutions to suffocating disrupted communication swallowed by an overly consumer oriented society moving toward intellectual inertia. America, perhaps, symbolizes the entire gray area between the binary of good and evil.

The closer Oedipa comes to realizing the breadth of her discoveries the closer she also comes to the void, a place where she is alone, stripped of companions and allies. Once Oedipa learns that Driblette, her best connection to possible meaning behind the Tristero, has also disappeared, she recognizes that "they are stripping away, one by one, my men." Her shrink, husband, lover, and guide have left her. Is this, then, her escape? She relates her feelings to "a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out over the abyss..." The image is an allusion to the Rapunzel tower metaphor from the very first chapter. Oedipa is again trapped within a high structure. Instead of her hair flowing over the side, she is a curtain on the window, fluttering over a void. Now, no one stands below who can reach her, either by crawling up or using a credit card. Her men have been stripped and she flutters hopelessly alone. What lies below is the unknown, the truth that Oedipa will wait at the end of the novel to find.

Perhaps the tragedy that Pynchon is alighting upon is neither the entrapment of Oedipa nor her loneliness but her inability to explore the void below. She is attached to the window in this metaphor, able to be pushed by the wind in and out of the tower but she will always be pulled back. Instead of becoming stronger when she is left to carry on her search relatively alone, Oedipa retreats into a sort of madness and hesitancy. She will no longer follow up the leads she has and will soon attempt suicide. Remember the skirt on the nymph of the Echo Courts sign. The face of that nymph resembled Oedipa's and thus a similarity is drawn between the metaphor of Oedipa as Echo, aimlessly hearing her own cry echo in a void, and that of her fluttering as a curtain above the void. In either case, transmissions of communication and significance rarely reach receptors and the individual becomes further isolated. Still, at the end, Oedipa will sit alone, calmly waiting. Pynchon seems to be evoking an image of strength after all, of America perhaps actively waiting for the future, poised to do something it does not yet know. We cannot be sure.

Oedipa attempts to reach Driblette beyond the grave parallel her attempts to communicate with Nefastis' Demon machine. In both cases, the piston refuses to move. The transfer of communication is refused, a metaphor for Pynchon's theme of the entropic move toward inertia as well as the theme of disrupted human connections because of the motion of modernity to consumerism above humanism. Just as working the Demon would have started a molecular sorting process, Oedipa looks to Driblette to sort through the information she has received on the Tristero. Nefastis had told Oedipa, "Communication is the key...Entropy is a figure of speech, then, a Metaphor...The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true." The sorting done by the machine tries to uncover which information works against entropy versus the type of noninformation Oedipa has witnessed on other occasions, such a the newsless letter Fallopian receives. This metaphor, as we have discussed, is thematically the driving metaphor of the novel and thus functions similarly as Oedipa again searches for validation and help. Synecdochal of the reading process, Driblette is called upon to sort through the evidence she has found and tell her which is true/significant/valuable and which is newsless noninformation. Yet again, no response comes because with Pynchon answers are never given. The reader must work through this process of sorting the fluff from the significant just as Oedipa must.

Oedipa's process of sorting has slowed considerably by the time she meets Bortz and learns that Driblette has died. She believes there is a connection between Driblette's mentioning the Trystero the night she saw the play and his death but Bortz and the students scoff at the idea. They support Driblette's own explanation that as director he had a subjective vision of the play which he simply constructed. Oedipa's inability to contact Driblette as his burial would seem to support this but we also know how the other men in Oedipa's life have been "stripped away" and thus doubt is set in place. Oedipa is able to make a certain history of the Tristero up to a point that libraries have information. After that point, she must depend on the recreations of Bortz and the overwhelming information that Cohen suddenly supplies. Fallopian, also turning and changing on Oedipa, proposes that she consider that the Tristero may have been a hoax conceived by Pierce. This possibility has hit her but she does not want to face it. Cohen provides Oedipa with the meaning of the WASTE acronym and a catalog which has a pasted addendum identifying a Tristero stamp. When Oedipa learns that the book was purchased at Zapf's and then that Pierce had owned not only Zapf's and Tremaine's but also the Tank Theatre, she realizes that every connection to the Tristero could be linked to Pierce. The routes of communication it seems, even the alternate underground routes of the disinherited, ironically lead back to the inheritance left by a wealthy California real estate mogul. This symbolizes Pynchon's fear of social and intellectual entropy, cutting off individual transmissions and transforming a society into a commercial state of inertia.

Just as Cohen throws more and more evidence and information Oedipa's way as the novel progresses, the novel continues to overload the reader with references, metaphors, empty symbols, and language. Cohen miraculously finds a transcript of an article giving a history of the Tristero during the French Revolution. Without any machine to sort out the truth, Oedipa feels overwhelmed and lost. When Bortz suggests that Oedipa check the article's legitimacy, she does not. Instead, her pain becomes physically manifested. The abundance of symbols and signals is symbolized in the pregnancy that Oedipa fears. She ultimately links the pregnancy to the horror of the Tristero, but only after first seeing a gynecologist under the name of Grace Bortz. Perhaps, Oedipa hoped the find grace under the pressure of her despair but she realizes that this is not possible. Answers seemed to be spreading further apart from Oedipa rather than coming closer to her. She hopes that she is mad because then she has an answer, a category, an explanation which justifies the events happening to her. Otherwise, the void is real either because Pierce has tricked her, or because the Tristero is a true plot, or both.

These explanations share contrasting characteristics because of Oedipa's increasingly reduced existence contrasted with the boundlessness contained within the legacy of America. As the critic, Tanner describes the conflict, "Oedipa is mentally in the world of Œif' and Œperhaps,' walking through an accredited world of of either/or. It is part of her pain, her dilemma and, perhaps, her emancipation." Oedipa first sees four symmetrical explanations for the Tristero but her options, like her men, are soon stripped and reduced. As Hayles comments, "As if to accentuate the danger, the imagery shows a decreasing range of options in a computerized landscape...The reductive process gradually excludes the middle range until there are four, then only two choices left, Œone or zero,' meaning or non-meaning." We are thus reminded of the theme of the excluded middle as Oedipa simultaneously enters a void with few boundaries. Oedipa herself considers the excluded middle. Pynchon writes, "She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it happened here, with chances once so good for diversity?" Binaries are represented in stark extremism, progressively as the novel nears the end. After Oedipa has hopelessly driven the highways with her headlights off and then called the Greek Way with no success, she is finally stripped of all of the possible exits she has come up with. As Grant comments, "[Oedipa] wonders to the very end whether she might not indeed have discovered Œa real alternative to the exitlessness' of contemporary experience, but she is never sure." She walks along the railroad tracks, symbolizing the many lines of communication which are often confused, manipulated, empty, or disrupted. The similar metaphor was created with the lines surrounding Driblette's eyes like a series of estranged but interconnecting networks.

Oedipa has been walking this line since the beginning but does not realize until this point, when she is unable to see the boundaries of San Narciso, that Pierce's legacy is America. As Oedipa asks the reader and herself, "What was left to inherit?" The grey remains of life which haunted Mucho when he worked as a used cars salesman? The disinherited of society? The disrupted transmissions and the overload of empty signals? As Tanner illuminates, "The Tristero system may be a great hoax; but it might be Œall true.'" The last pages of Pynchon's work are metonymically filled to capacity with language, dragging the reader further into the mire of syntax and possible critical significance. We are asked, what is the word and how does it differ from the Word? We are asked, what is America? At the end of the novel, the Tristero is metaphorically an aborted pregnancy representing an the middle between an America as empty as the void of oblivion and as dichotomously divided as a computer program or the circuit card of a transistor radio. Pynchon asks, what exists between these binaries? Who hides in the symbolism and significance of America? Who will inherit America and what will they inherit?

The Tristero changes for Oedipa during her search accordingly, following the reader's search for meaning and Pynchon's thematic elaboration of his concern for intellectual inertia and the disinherited of America in an increasingly consumption oriented society. As Hayles informs us, "Thus the values assigned to the Tristero keep changing...Underlying these uncertainties is the profoundly ambiguous relationship of the text to its own language. Interrogating the conditions of possibility for its utterances, it is never able to resolve whether its language play is a postmodern excursion into consensual constructions or a thrust through the theater curtain to a higher order of reality, in which we may, after all, be mere playthings....The only unthinkable option is not to question, to remain insulated within placid acceptances." As we wait with Oedipa as the novel closes, symbolic of the acronym We Await Silent Tristero's Empire, she, at least, is still questioning and still searching. The answer thus is not nearly as significant to Pynchon as the drive to avoid an entropic process of intellectual inertia. The closed system of entropy, the enclosed tower of Oedipa's vision, have been opened onto the void of America's legacy and the possibility to bring true human contact back to a world which increasingly strives to calculate ones and zeros.

• Biography of Thomas Pynchon
• About The Crying of Lot 49
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 1
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 2
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 3
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 4
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 5
• Summary and Analysis of Chapter 6
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