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Oedipa's Search For Truth In The Crying Of Lot 49

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Oedipa’s search for truth is caught in a paradox: On one hand, she is (or at least believes she is) in search of “absolute” meaning; on the other hand, that meaning is concentrated around herself and is shutting her off from the world around her in a subjective circle of signification where the communicational void she wishes to escape is filled with illusions of meaning. Oedipa’s search is fueled by a belief that it will bring to an "end her encapsulation in her tower (Pynchon 31)." The complication to her journey is that all language (truth, communication, meaning, etc.…) is founded in entropy, on a waste of force that alone makes possible the fictional constitution of abstract truth. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon uses the ideas of entropy in thermodynamics and information theory (through Maxwell’s Demon) to more fully delve into Oedipa’s paradoxical search for meaning in a world that has created, forgotten, and rediscovered it’s own truth.
Thermodynamics is the study of the relationship between heat and other energies. It deals with the changes within a system if the energy distribution in that system is unbalanced. Thermodynamic entropy is the measure of this chaos in the universe. In beginning of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas realizes that she exists within "the confinement of [a] tower, (11)” that is similar to a closed system. Entropy thrives in closed systems; therefore, if she does not open her system she is doomed to slow degradation, till she is nothing

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