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.