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.
Very likely, The Crying of Lot 49 is an outgrowth of V. The environment is similar--still impersonal, but eventful; and it is probably sinister, with an abundance of menace and meaning for its citizens. Tony Tanner states: "It is a short, curiously lyrical novel which forms what amounts to an addendum
to V . . . The novel starts when she (Oedipa Maas) learns that she has been named as an executrix of the will of an old lover, Pierce Inverarity, a tycoon whose holdings and enterpr...