The Crying of Lot 49: Worldview

There isn’t a lot of clarity in Thomas Pynchon's short story, The Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa Maas goes off on a mystery-filled journey after being named executor of her ex-boyfriend’s will. On her journey Oedipa is filled with uncertainty which leads her to question the world around her, however, nothing introduced in the story ever becomes clear. It is this element of confusion and unclarity that offers a perspective of the world during this time through Pynchon’s eyes.

Taking into account all of the questions left without an answer, the book appears to be working towards lack of meaning. This idea is reinforced with the introduction of LSD in The Crying of Lot 49. “Mucho,” Oedipa’s husband, begins to take LSD towards the end of the book and it drives him to lose “his identity [becoming] less himself and more generic” (115). There is nothing meaningful about this and only adds to the lack of clarity in a person’s life and the way drug use adds to the fuzziness of the story it is reasonable to say that Pynchon held this negative opinion of drugs and thus reveals a negative worldview for this particular concept mimicked the world at that time.  

The ending of the book also adds to the “nothing matters” idea. In the ending scene “Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49” from which she expected to get answers (152). Does she get them? The reader nevers finds out. Closing the story as vaguely as every other thing it contains contributes to the idea that nothing about the story matters. If it did questions would have answers and investigations would contribute explanations, neither of which happen in The Crying of Lot 49.

The protagonist, Oedipa also reveals a couple things about the perspective. Oedipa, the only relevant woman in the text, can be considered someone not perfectly stable, mentally, since she has a psychotherapist. This makes the reader question the legitimacy of her “discoveries” and creates a story told with many holes and jumps, never knowing what is true and what is not. On page 88 for example, the narrator says “either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed, perhaps fantasied by Oedipa.” This statement sets apart the two possibilities but doesn’t state which one is the truth and the book does this for all other conspiracies Oedipa finds herself tracing. The fact the text puts no effort in trying to seperate fiction from nonfiction shows that people don’t care what is real and what isn’t and the Pynchon’s writing of a book with no meaning yet having people reading it as if it had meaning is him mocking society

While, for the most part the book works on critiquing the world, there is a hint of hope and it is found in the way Oedipa develops as a character. While all the males surrounding her do fall in the trap of meaningless things the world offers, Oediapa does not. In fact, Oedipa manages to end the story in a better place than the one she started from. At the beginning Oedipa is, what can be considered, a typical housewife, perfectly fitted to the ideas of womanhood. She attends “Tupperware part[ies],” needs her husband’s help asking, “what am I going to do” when she receives the letter and her identity begins as “Mrs Oedipa Maas,” a married woman (1,7). As the story moves forward she escapes these things and goes on a search for knowledge, becoming a woman who is aware of the world and isn’t encaged by ideas of womanhood such as lack of independence, and being just a wife. Realizing this difference in Oedipa gives hope because, among all the uncertainty, and the absence of a sense of reality, she is able to grow.

Overall the perspective taken by The Crying of Lot 49 is a negative but hopeful one. The book is not in agreeance with what is happening in the world, if it was it wouldn’t be critiquing it all around. The optimism shown through the hope present is directed to the individual itself. Because of what is described above, it is logical to make this claim seen as, as a population things are not moving forward but as an individual it is possible to grow and be better. Due to this it can also be said that the book is not accepting the current situation but rather hopes to move it forward by moving woman, something derived from the fact that the character who does well is the only woman in the text, and by moving woman generations can also be moved.

Word Count: 781