Crying Of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49, follows California housewife Oedipa Maas, after her ex-lover dies and designates her the co-executor of his estate. She becomes entangled in a convoluted historical mystery, sorting through a plethora of information surrounding an underground Tristero system of communication. Just as Oedipa searches for meaning within the narrative, the reader searches for meaning within the text and within the language of the novel itself. The novel is filled with excess information, codes, messages, secret languages, historical and literary allusions, puns, parodies, and figures of all sorts. These elements of the narrative deceive Oedipa and the reader into expecting revelation is at hand and that the world

The mazy prose, consisting of an excess of information, metaphors, and symbols, parallels Oedipa’s tangled adventures. Just as Oedipa becomes lost within her landscape, the reader becomes lost within the text: “The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images..” Oedipa wanders through the imaginary city of San Narcisco, searching for symbols and meaning. This reflects the reader’s wanderings through the actual text of the novel. They continue to parallel one another throughout Oedipa’s journey and her investigation across the city. To add to the confusion and layering of the prose, the text is also compared to the human body. The “blood’s branchings” are representative of the words in the novel and how they are constructed and assembled. It is a text body wherein our search for meaning within the text varies and is indistinct. Sometimes we struggle to interpret the text and to make connections; it is like “capillaries too small for more than peering into.” Other times, it is like “shameless municipal hickeys.”; the significance of the text seems to be quite clear. However, “vessels mashed together” form these visible “hickeys”. So while the “hickeys” may appear obvious, what lies beneath them is muddled and obscure. The metaphor reveals the reader’s continual search for meaning within the text and the subsequent inability to make sense of