Oedipa forms relationships with many of the people she encounters on her journey for truth that are beyond acquaintance level and affect her emotionally. She repeatedly questions, in the 6th chapter, who could she be that all of her relationships have changed. The beginning of her journey is caused by her romantic relationship to Pierce before she marries Mucho, creating for herself this complication. This relationship is not completely moral as she is dating Mucho and even refers to herself as Pierce’s mistress when they were together. This relationship ends because of her commitment to Mucho. In the very beginning of the novel we are presented with her annoyance of her husband, foreshadowing her unfaithfulness and hopelessness in their relationship. She then has to work with Metzger and immediately has an affair with him but has some hope in their relationship. We also get a sense of her lack of trust in her shrink and his LSD experiments. She also has very intricate relationships with almost every other acquaintance she has throughout the novel.
By the end of the novel, Oedipa claims these relationships have changed and does not consider her as the cause for at least some of them. She begins to distance herself and even admits of her isolation and withdrawnness at the peak of her discovery of the W.A.S.T.E system. I do not know what she expects from a husband who she doesn’t want to be around, a shrink that experiments with LSD, a romantic affair, and strangers who she questions about something that is supposed to be a secret. It is her distance from these characters and her distance from them that creates these relationship failures. Though she cannot be blamed for the hopeful lead of Randy Driblette and his ultimate killing himself before she could meet with him, she does shy away from people that Bortz tries to connect her with to give her answers.
These relationship failures could either be a support of her paranoia that we have seen throughout the novel in that she perceives these characters to have changed when really she just lacks trust in their commitment to her; or this could be support for the theory of her being setup and these characters were all involved.
As an extension of what you've noticed, what do you think the overall purpose of these multiple failures is? You point out through the examples you cite that these relationships are primarily with men. You might think about them in the context of those four options related to the tower at the beginning of the novel.
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