Carefully read the following
passage from The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Then write an essay in which you analyze how
Pynchon’s style and choice of these and other images from the novel convey the
complexity of Oedipa’s understanding of reality.
“Meaning what? That Bortz, along with Metzger, Cohen,
Driblette, Koteks, the tattooed sailor in San Francisco, the W.A.S.T.E.
carriers she’d seen—that all of them were Pierce Inverarity’s men? Bought?
Or loyal, for free, for fun, to some grandiose practical joke he’d
cooked up, all for her embarrassment, or terrorizing, or moral improvement?
“Change your name to Miles, Dean,
Serge, and/or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the half-light of
that afternoon’s vanity mirror. Either
way, they’ll call it paranoia.
They. Either you have stumbled
indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret
richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of
Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of
routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government
delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the
absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know,
and you too, sweetie. Or you are
hallucinating it. Or a plot has been
mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the
forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements,
planting post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing librarians, hiring of
professional actors and Pierce Inverarity only knows what-all besides, all
financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your
non-legal mind to know about even though you are a co-executor, so labyrinthine
that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in
which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.”
(Pynchon,
170-171)
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