Oedipa and attention (or inattention) to her name

When I first started reading "The Crying of Lot 49," the first thing I noticed as a theme or hint to subject matter within the novel was nothing other than Oedipa's name and the referential qualities it had to the Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex.

Oedipus, as one of the most iconic tragic heroes (and one of the first) to ever come across literature and storytelling within ancient worlds. Any reference to Oedipus and his story almost seemed like a cop-out, or an overstepped boundary in comparing a woman with such a non-subtle adaptation of the protagonist's name. After gaining a sense of Pynchon's dry-humored style and the ways in which he contorted modern literature into a game of symbols and expected outcomes, it became clear that Oedipa's name was purposefully gimmicky. 

I imagine Pynchon wanted invasive, over-analyzing readers like me to look at Oedipa and say, Oh she's a tragic hero. I bet she's going to kill her dad, or lose all her status, or gouge out her eyes. The obviousness of it, however, would have been too, well, obvious.

As the novel started out, I was beginning to gain the sense of Oedipa's paranoia as a mirrored construction of the reader's paranoia, as we're looking for meaning, hoping to grasp an important theme out of a mundane detail, or throwing ourselves in the wrong direction with no one else to stop us. The dramatic irony within her actions was one of few comparisons I saw to Oedipus the King. The audience's anticipation of Oedipa's doom, as well as our own doom, was an intended outcome to her name.

What does not match up is her denouement. There is no climax nor realization within the tragic hero in which she realizes every mistake she has made thus far, and then plummets into her doom. The nonresolute ending of "The Crying of Lot 49" is supposed to be unsatisfactory in contrast to Oedipus Rex. In Greek tragedy, that witness of everything tumbling down on the hero may not be pleasant for an audience, but at least the satisfaction of everything being ruined after all that anticipation would be fulfilled. Pynchon's rejection of that resolution pokes at the author further, just as he has the whole novel.

To end with the comparison between Oedipa's journeys and a "tunnel" of truth, the symbol is an embodiment of the reader and Oedipa as well. Where we stumble through the darkness with no hint of an outside world, nor no guarantee of an end, we carry on through the novel as a tunnel promises an end, conventionally, just as Oedipus Rex promises tragedy. What's unfortunate about a tunnel is that where our preconceived notions about tunnels (and comparatively, novels), yield an end to the darkness. Though, there is no real way knowing. The reality lies within the darkness, not the light at the end, which is unavailable to us.

Francisco Tirado