Pictures:
http://rriderlausd.org/blog2/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/love.jpg

http://www.yvonnemunnik.com/galerie_upload/Sadness.jpg

src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/HamletSkullHCSealous.jpg"

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2009/10/24/1256373679100/LSD-Art-Life-magazine-001.jpg

Book:
The Crying of Lot 49- Thomas Pynchon


Online Resource:
http://www.time.com/time/archive/

This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.

This book is one of the most confusing I have ever read but to get it's full effect you just have to read. I think a very important question in reading any book is to ask why. Why did Thomas Pynchon decide to write this novel? He had written others before, but this one is often considered his best to date.

I feel that this book can be related to the works of Bradbury and Welles who had great caution about the new technologies and ways their generations were going. I feel that he became inspired by the situations presented around him which were the most important factor in writing this book because without inspiration it would carry no meaning. I think he wrote it not only as a precautionary tale but also as something to help the reader reflect upon themselves.

As with many famous books, this book was actually frowned upon when it was first released. The critics of TIME criticized it for it's gibberish writing. Though, about forty years later they named it as one of the "100 greatest English novels of our TIME". Pynchon's work can easily criticized for it's hard to decipher language and cryptic plots but the overall symbolic and thematic elements can also be observed and have great power throughout the novel.

Because I did not already mention this I will finish up by summarizing the end of the novel. As Oedipa gets more clues and connections to the whole mail conspiracy, she gets further crazy on trying to figure things out. She realizes after gaining many clues though that her exboyfriend may have set all of these things up just to give her a difficult time. This sends her into confusion and her mind into chaos. At the end though, she attends an auction(at lot 49) where she may meet someone who can explain all of the clues to her. Then it ends. Thats it, no explanation or tying up of loose strings.

This ending could be seen as very disappointing to the reader, but Pynchon did it for a reason. And again we must ask, why? I feel that he does this to give the point that there are not many definite answers in life, no definite endings or beginnings. He also does this to leave us with the question of whether everything Oedipa decides is true or not, which will keep us thinking long after reading.

It's really hard to find a picture symbolizing love, so I just went with the obvious. But if you look closely at this picture she is covering up her eyes by "Love" which can express how sometimes people can become hidden, confused, or "blinded" by love. The main character in this book encounters love in many ways. Her main mission is to execute the will of a man who she loved, which leads her on the journey she takes. But also she encounters people who make her think differently about love. A man she had an affair with, a man who wants to sleep with her, and a man who is a member of a club for people "recovering" from being in love. She truly wonders whether or not the things she is doing are from love, and whether she needs to recover herself.


This picture to me represents the loneliness of a girl who is all by herself. This is what Oedipa experiences frequently throughout the novel. Throughout she is trying to determine if everyone is with her, against her, or if anyone really cares. Especially when she is trying to figure out the conspiracy she thinks it is only her that is figuring all this out, and makes connections with people but they fall apart really. And at the end she comes back to find her husband on LSD and feels utterly alone.



A major chapter in the story deals with a play inside a story just like in hamlet. Like the play in Hamlet it is symbolic of what is happening in the real lives of the characters. It was here that Pynchon tried to bring contrast to the writers of his day and the way in which Shakespeare wrote, and tried to bring to the surface what he thought was missing so much in the literature of his time.



This picture kind of shows a view of the drug culture of the era that this book was written in, around the 1960's. This is a major theme and point of consideration in the book. Her own doctor prescribes Oedipa with LSD to take but she refuses, and after her trip she comes home to find her husband strung out on LSD and feels completely alone in her own world. This gives the sense that drugs can be harmful and lead to loneliness and being alone.

There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: and what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited upon her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else? (Pynchon 35)

Although Pynchon's style seems somewhat unrefined he uses many rhetorical devices. In the first sentence we see his use of a metaphor in comparing Oedipa to a "captive maiden". It then makes an extended metaphor by comparing her ego to a tower. It is like this because it only captivates her as long as she lets it. He also uses frequent repetition when he says: "examine this formless magic, understand how it works, measure its fild strength, count its line of force" This adds emphasis to her task and what she needs to do and helps the reader understand how important it is to the book. He also poses a question at the end, ending with what else?

He also has a very wide vocabulary and used many descriptive words like "deliverance" and "malignant". He also uses humor in the line "or go mad, or marry a disc jockey" which is ironic, because her husband is a disc jockey and she compares it to going mad.

Other than this quote Pynchon uses many other rhetorical devices. He uses satire a lot and provides sharp criticisms of his time. His syntax sometimes varies, but most frequently it is composed of long wordy sentences. en example of this can be seen here:

A number of frail girls... prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.(Pynchon 36)

They often contain repetitive words, that add emphasis to the point he is trying to make but can also be very confusing. His writing is also rich of details which you can see in the above quote. He uses imagery to let the reader really feel like they are experiencing what the main character is.

Throughout the book, Pynchon introduces many themes and criticisms that are not only very relevant to today but also modern and applicable. Here are some of the most important themes.

Communication
Communication is an important theme in this book and it is shown mainly through the great chaos that is going on throughout the book. Throughout the book there are plots and sub plots within pages. Everything in the story is told chaotically. In the end it is the chaos and lack of communication that causes many problems. This book was written at a time when many technologies were changing the way we communicated and how it was done. Pynchon tries to use this to show the theme that communication is one of the most important elements of society that can not be replaced or changed.
examples in text:

And the voices before and after the dead man's that had phoned at random during the darkest slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial's ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy love, whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger of the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word.(Pynchon 86)

Important vs. Unimportant
Throughout the book Oedipa is chasing something that she is not even sure exists. She experiences many things that either prove to her that it exists, while some lead her otherwise. Either way she is not sure what to think and often many of her experiences turn sort of unreal and imaginary. This adds exclamation the point of the important vs the unimportant because Pynchon raises the point that Oedipa may be spending all of her time chasing something that is unreal and in the long run unimportant. It also poses the question of what in life is really worth finding out
and what should you just let go.

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth's numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum.(Pynchon 58)

Paranoia is a very important topic in this book. It raises questions about Americans and the current lifestyle and also defines a generation. In the book he raises questions about what this generation worries about and what preoccupies our time. You can see this in a quote from the novel:

"You one of those right wing nut outfits?" inquired the diplomatic Metzger.
Fallopian twinkled. "They accuse us of being paranoids."
"They?" inquired Metzger, twinkling also.
"Us?" asked Oedipa.

This shows the concern of the main characters as well as the confusion surrounding what they believe. It shows Oedipa's want of belonging too, and her being paranoid of being left out.

He uses it in some way to connect the reader to Oedipa, and is one of the strongest devices used. Throughout the book Oedipa is trying to find the meaning of things important and unimportant, this can be related to the person reading because they are also trying to decipher Pynchon's sometimes cryptic writing to reveal hidden meanings. This relates us to Oedipa because once we realize what is going on we can sympathize with her throughout the book. Also, the things in the book that oedipa becomes paranoid of(more of a feeling of mass chaos) we too get the feeling of chaos.

He tries to relate this feeling of paranoia and mass chaos to our generation by combining it with the California. It is often defined as being ruthless to your competitors in looks and fashion and competing with everyone around you on looks and wealth.

It also shows the drug culture of the 60's and how that can lead to paranoia. At one part Oedipa starts getting paranoid, seeing signs everywhere. This showed how many at the time let drugs control their lives and thoughts. It changed a generation of americans and the way they thought.

Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937. He has written other books, his most famous of which being V. He attended Cornell University and even went to lectures by famous Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov. This would go on to influence some of his fiction.

To understand this book you have to understand that it was based on the culture of the sixties and seventies. This culture was heavily influenced by drugs, music and emerging status of Hollywood. Pynchon made The Crying of Lot 49 to be a satire on the current culture he was experiencing. The drugs were directly addressed by the book. Oedipa's doctor recommends that she take LSD to ease her depression a fact balked upon by the main character. This is somewhat making fun of the doctors who thought this remedy would help but lost their patients even more to it. Music was another big subject of satire in this book. He makes comments about the music and famous musical figures of the time by introducing us to the "Paranoids" a band eerily similar to the Beatles. They are pot smoking, lazy, girl crazed, members of a popular band. I think by this he was trying to put a funny play on the Beatles but also showing how obsessed people became with people who were easily relate able to us. He also addresses the "Hollywood Culture" and it's status at the time. The place in California that they live is called "San Narcisso" a play on the word narcissist or someone who is obsessed with themselves. Here he shows us his view on some of the people of that time and gives the impression that they were only into themselves, and did not care for the well being of other people. These three topics give a greater meaning to his novel, when you see he was trying to put a humorous criticism of the 60s 70s culture.