ises in California turn out to be almost limitless. Before he died he had the habit of calling her up from unknown distances and places and speaking to her in a range of assumed and bewilderingly differing voices--from comic tones to simulated Fascistic threats. His will, as it transpires, 'speaks' in comparably multiple ambiguities, and as Oedipa tries to discover the meaning of the will, in a sense her inheritance, she enacts, by analogy, a quest into the meaning of that larger heritage called America . . ." (174). As Tanner says, there is a quest archetype in this novel. Oedipa Maas, a housewife suddenly forced to leave her safe cul-de-sac in California to execute an old lover's will, is the unwilling seeker.
She really has no intention of stumbling upon a centuries-old conspiracy bent on challenging that most sacred and eff
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