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What Is The Theme Of The Crying Of Lot 49

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The Crying of Lot 49 is a 1966 novella written by Thomas Pynchon amidst the spike in social and political turbulence in the United States of America. The 1960s saw the rise of drug culture, the Vietnam War, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s assassination, the massive rise of the Civil Rights fight and many other milestone events. Pynchon’s novella carries the perceptive sense of chaos, quite possibly influenced by two things: one, the decade that he was living and writing in and two, that this was one of his earliest novels. The text explores the consequences of decisions, illusions and conspiracies all taken on by the protagonist Oedipa Maas.

One of the main themes of the short piece is communication. This is explored greatly in the …show more content…

A mundane example is the television in Chapter 1. However, Oedipa’s ‘religious experience’ in Chapter 2 is more telling. The moment ends quickly and Pynchon writes that “she gave it up presently, as if a cloud had approached the sun…and so broken the ‘religious instance’, whatever it might have been”. This leaves Oedipa with the knowledge that although she cannot specify what exactly happened, she knows that it wasn't nothing. It is simply an implicit message, involving no two sided communication. At a motel, Oedipa plays a game of Strip Botticelli as suggested by Metzger. Though she undresses through her multiple layers, she never reaches entire nudity. This could be: a) a reference to society, that no matter how much you uncover it or how long you spend uncovering it, it will always remain shrouded and contain secrets that you will never be able to seek out or b) a reference to Oedipa herself for the multi-faceted character that she is can never be entirely exposed. However, this is left entirely implicit, for the reader to ponder …show more content…

The Crying of Lot 49 lives up to it’s satirical nature in mocking Fallopian and later many other radicals to signify the extremist nature of real life character’s facades in the 1960s. By making such a political statement, Pynchon could be making a reference to the 1964 elections in which the Democrats snatched all the votes from Congress from right up under them. Chapter 3 is also very important as it serves as our first introduction to the evasive ‘Tristero’. Oedipa goes in to watch the production of The Courier's Tragedy thinking of bones, hears the word ‘Tristero’, and comes out thinking only of the word. She herself later realizes this. It is possible that the bones could have been another red herring to throw us off the plot. This novella seems to be entirely made up of red

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