The Crying of Lot 49

This essay examines the character, Oedipa Maas, who is the protagonist in Thomas Pynchon's second novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). Essentially, this novel is concerned with a quest for meaning--a situation also true of Pynchon's first novel V. As Robert A. Hipkiss suggests: "Oedipa Maas inherits Stencil's role as the seeker after a moral order underlying an apparently amoral, perhaps inherently immoral, world. Like Stencil, she sees man's destiny in either/or terms . . ." (11).

For the purpose of communicating his concepts concerning Oedipa and the world in which she lives, Pynchon uses such literary techniques.as Menippean satire. Northrop Frye describes this approach: "The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenues, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior. The Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent . . ." (309). Pynchon, then, takes an intellectual stance, with an abundance of allegory and symbolic language. In Pynchon's style, there are clusters of fantastic learning, with patches of verse combined with the prose.

Related Essays

The Crying of Lot 49 Upon reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, there is a sense that Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of the novel, is treading the path walked earlier in .... (1275 5 )

The Changed Studio System .... is driven entirely by home video (Hirschberg 49-51 .... Weinsteins, They've stepped up to a .... of big .... videotape, Like Water for Chocolate, and The Crying Game, the .... (4044 16 )

Miramax Films .... of the Weinsteins, They've stepped up to a .... of big .... The success of The Crying Game came through an act of .... Harvey and Bob." New York (October 10, 1994), 49-57 .... (2953 12 )

Biblical Perspective on the Life Span .... and laid her hand on her head, and went on crying. .... Had .... been more prudent earlier, they might not have been so .... saying which he spake unto them (Luke 2:49-50 .... (3937 16 )

Celtic Music and Appalachia .... but in the end it is a Celtic 'crying out loud .... That owes a .... to the fact that, until the internal .... message about the lifelong value of music making (Ernst 49). .... (10298 41 )

So began for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero. Or rather, her attendance at some unique performance, prolonged as if it were the last of the night, something a little extra for whoever'd stayed this late. As if the breakaway gowns, net bras, jeweled garters and G-strings of historical figuration that would fall away were layered dense as Oedipa's own streetclothes in that game with Metzger in front of the Baby Igor movie; as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite black hours long would indeed be necessary before The Tristero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness . . . " (54). This assortment of facts is like a montage of Oedipa's neurotic tendencies. The sexual imagery reveals the sexual or Freudian nature of Oedipa's character. Her very name "Oedipa" suggests an Oedipal psychological condition. Oedipa becomes strangely more scholarly and isolated as her research into The Tristero System progresses further. Tony Tanner states: "One form of narcissism is to regard one's particular fantasy of the world as the definitive reality, and it is part of Oedipa's growing agony that she cannot be sure to what extent she herself is guilty of this. In the past she had, we gather, seen herself rather in the role

Category: Literature - T