Oedipa’s Futile Search For Meaning

In its first five chapters, The Crying of Lot 49 seems like the metaphorical ball of yarn that unravels and unravels without ever revealing a center.  Despite Oedipa’s best efforts to uncover the mysteries in her life, she never seems to gain a complete picture – each clue leads only to more questions.   For example, when Oedipa goes to The Courier’s Tragedy in the hopes of working out some meaning in the fact that both Inverarity and the characters in the play are connected with the “bones of lost battalion in [a] lake” that are “fished up” and “turned into charcoal” (Pynchon 48), she finds no answer to the questions she entered with, and leaves puzzling over a new mystery: the meaning of “Trystero” (Pynchon 58).  Furthermore, when Oedipa approaches Stanley Koteks about the WASTE system, he merely tells her about the Nefastis machine and gives her the address of someone else to talk to, without giving her any real answers (Pynchon 69). 

From the very beginning, Pynchon is mocking both Oedipa and the reader’s desire to find meaning.  In only Chapter 2, when Oedipa and Metzger are playing Strip Botticelli, Oedipa goes through a “progressive removal of clothing that seem[s] to bring her no closer to nudity” (Pynchon 28) – a scene that turns out to mimic both Oedipa and the reader’s futile quests for meaning throughout the following chapters.  It seems that Pynchon is speaking directly through Driblette when Driblette tells Oedipa, “You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several…you could waste your life that way and never touch the truth” (Pynchon 62-63). 

Pynchon most likely sent Oedipa on her difficult, mainly unproductive quests for meaning – first of the bones, then of the symbol in the Scope bathroom, then of the Trystero – to chastise readers for constantly searching for meaning in art.  Oedipa begins the book “shuffling through a fat deckful of days which seem…more or less identical” (Pynchon 2), and it is only once she begins her first mission – to sort out Inverarity’s will – that her days become exciting and unique.  Ironically, however, it is because there are so few clues to guide her that Oedipa so wholeheartedly embraces her quests for meaning.  While she is following clues and gathering evidence, Oedipa is actively in control of her life and free from the confining routine of her suburban life with Mucho.  However, once the mystery is resolved and Oedipa has no more clues to follow, she knows she will return to her lackluster life with Mucho.  Thus, Oedipa is motivated not only to keep searching for meaning in the clues she has, despite her incremental progress, but also to keep perpetually on the lookout for new mysteries, in order to remain questing for meaning for as long as she can.   In this way, Pynchon is also urging the reader to take pleasure in the experience of art itself – however confusing or inarticulate that may be – rather than primarily seeking meaning.