A Summation of Confusion

                 During our discussion of chapters four and five in class on Thursday, I found myself wondering if maybe, this “quest” that Oedipa was on to find meaning was a subconscious way of keeping herself sane in her mundane life.  This “quest” added excitement to her life and there was always another clue to look for and interpret, even if she was not so great at finding and interpreting the clues herself.  However, thinking about this idea more, if this is the case that her “quest” is a way to keep her sane, it is ironic that the very quest that is supposed to keep her sane, is in actuality driving her crazy – she does not have a grasp on what is reality and what is not, and neither does the reader.  I think that the irony in this goes along with the rest of the book, which seems to have a lot of irony in it.  Pynchon meant for a number of ironic ideas to go with the book, including the fact that he is making fun of literary criticism and here we are in a literature class analyzing his book and talking about the idea that he is making fun of the very thing we are doing.

I remember someone saying in class that they had read The Crying of Lot 49 before, and that the ending does not have a final moment where everything from the books wraps up and is explained.  However, I did find that the last chapter did a wonderful job of summing up how I felt about the book, or rather the confusion I felt while reading it.  The question I kept asking myself, and I am sure I am not the only person in class asking this, was: what is real, and what is just in Oedipa’s head?  Very close to the last chapter, the questions of fantasy and reality are wrapped up in a number of comparisons:

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth…the bones of the GI’s at the bottom of Lake Inverarity were there either for a reason that matters to the world, or for skin divers and cigarette smokers.  Ones and zeroes…For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy of America, or there was just America… (150-51)

I really enjoyed reading this paragraph because it completely summed up my questions about reality and fantasy in the book, and even though there is no conclusion to everything, something about reading the questions of real and made up were good enough for me.