The Crying of Lot 49

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.

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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
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1559
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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