Before the telephone was invented, people wrote letters to each other to stay in touch. Soldiers would write letters to their wives and families conveying their love and, even today, people write letters to better communicate. Writing is a way of...

Despite the fact that The Crying of Lot 49 is chock-full of the use of methods of communication, the only time when anything is actually communicated is when a few songs are sung by The Paranoids. Any letters mentioned in the novel are void of...

When reading Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" one is flooded with a deluge of historical references (dates, places, events) and, unless a historical genius, probably feels confused as to the historical accuracy of such references. As critics have...

Just before the morning rush hour, she got out of a jitney whose ancient driver ended each day in the red, downtown on Howard Street, began to walk toward the Embarcadero. She knew she looked terrible - knuckles black with eye-liner and mascara...

In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, standard hierarchical structures are abandoned in a setting of postmodern cultural chaos. The use of fragmented pop culture contributes to many aspects of the book, namely the sense of combined freedom in...

America used to be known as the land of opportunity. That was before the wars and the advent of technology. For post-modern authors, modernity and prosperity has turned America into a disappointment. Barthelme's Snow White and Pynchon's The Crying...

It is fitting to discuss the recollection of the past in an age advancing to an unknown futurity and whose memories are increasingly banished to the realm of the nostalgic or, even worse, obsolete. Thomas Pynchon and William Faulkner, in wildly...

A recurring theme that can be found in Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 is the conception that chaos has a tremendous effect on society. Pynchon engages in a dualistic method of literary technique to engender the realization of the...

Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, said, “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” Defining one’s personal identity may coincide with this ancient Stoic principle, but what is not mentioned is the human...

In The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon expresses a very interesting view of entropy through the actions of Oedipa Maas. In communication theory, entropy is a measure of the efficiency of a system, as a code or language, in transmitting...

A statement becomes intelligible when its component elements integrate into a unified structure. Stories, then, would convey meaning insofar as they fufill the conventions and boundaries of their genre. Jacques Derrida, however, deconstructs this...

“There are still the poor, the defeated, the criminal, the desperate, all hanging in there with what must seem a terrible vitality.” Thomas Pynchon, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” The challenge posed to any reader of “serious” literature is...

Near the end of Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 novel The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist Oedipa finds herself at a crossroads after trying to unravel the mystery of W.A.S.T.E., a conspiratorial underground postal system, without finding many tangible...

Although the postmodern classic The Crying of Lot 49 is known for its obscurity and lack of a single interpretation, it should not be seen as an experiment in a tortured narrative of curve-balls that destroys the reader’s assumptions without...

The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, both explore the ambiguous nature of human morality through the lens of mystery. Both texts are set in an urban environment, the...

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” Strother Martin stated in the 1967 film, Cool Hand Luke. This line could have easily been used in Thomas Pynchon’s novella published a year earlier, The Crying of Lot 49. The often convoluted...

Posthumanism paradoxically reconciles the antagonistic self and other in Thomas Pynchon’s V. through a mechanical transformation of human desire. In revealing these features of the narrative, analysis must draw on the mechanical transformations of...