Thos Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: No Escape

There are two levels of participation within The Crying of Lot 49: that of the characters, such as Oedipa Maas, whose world is limited to the text, and that of the reader, who looks at the world from outside it but who is also affected the world created by the text.3 Both the reader and the characters have the same problems observing the chaos around them. The protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Mass, like the reader, is forced to either involve herself in the deciphering of clues or not participate at all.4

The philosophy behind The Crying of Lot 49 seems to lie in the synthesis of philosophers and modern physicists. Ludwig Wittgenstein viewed the world as a "totality of facts, not of things."1 This idea can be combined with a physicist's view of the world as a closed system that tends towards chaos. Pynchon asserts that the measure of the world is its entropy.2 He extends this metaphor to his fictional world. He envelops the reader, through various means, within the system of The Crying of Lot 49.

Pynchon designed The Crying of Lot 49 so that there would be two levels of observation: that of the characters such as our own Oedipa Maas, whose world is limited to the text, and that of the reader, who looks at the world from outside it but who is also affected by his relationship to that world.3 Both the reader and the characters have the same problems observing the chaos around them. The protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Mass, like Pynchon's audience, is forced to either involve herself in the deciphering of clues or not participate at all.4

Oedipa's purpose, besides executing a will, is finding meaning in a life dominated by assaults on people's perceptions through drug...

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...rying of Lot 49," Mindful Pleasures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 3.

5 John Johnston. "Paranoia as a Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49,"New Essays on the Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.

6 "Paranoia", p. 4.

7 The Grim Phoenix, p. 15.

8 Crying of Lot 49, p. 49.

9 Robert Hipkiss, The American Absurd, (University of Chicago: New York), p. 90 10 Paranoia as a Semiotic Regime, p. 6.

11 Crying of Lot 49, p. 58.

12 Crying of Lot 49, p. 22

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13 The Grim Phoenix, p. 26

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14 Paranoia as a Semiotic Regime, p. 1

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15 Crying of Lot 49, p. 69.

16 Crying of Lot 49, p. 79

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17 David Seed, Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (University of Iowa Press: Iowa City), p. 124.