Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon's Entropic Text

The present dissertation is a study of Thomas Pynchon's three novels and a collection of short stories: V, The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Slow Learner: Early Stories. Pynchon is one of the most prominent contemporary postmodernist writers in America despite the fact that so far he has only published five fictions and a collection of stories. Entropy, a scientific concept, has been widely regarded as the most distinctive notion Pynchon employs. Many critics have rigidified his works into entropic understanding. In recent years and before he published his latest novels—Vineland and Mason & Dixon, there has been a certain amount of backing away from the strictly entropic view, and arose some arguments defying entropy as the underlying doctrine of Pynchon's creation. But the entropic view regarding his creation is still popular in China's academic circle. Based on textual analysis, this study tries to examine his earlier works from a cultural perspective and elaborates on the contextual and metaphorical use of the concept of entropy in his writing. On the whole, Pynchon's writing is devoted to the themes fundamental to the postmodernist literature. Pynchon's distinction does not lie in his fusion of entropic concept into his writing but in his novelty of presenting his favored themes through a scientific metaphor, a courageous transgression of the literary dictums prevalent at Joycean times.The Introduction explores what scarce information critics can find on Pynchon's personal history along with traces of the resulting influence that can be detected in his writing. In Chapter One, two connotations of entropy and their connecting medium Maxwell's Demon Hypothesis are explicated. Their relations are construed in line with the deconstructive theory. The Demon device constitutes a medium in which thermodynamic entropy and communication entropy frequently entwine and cross over into the other. Similarity between the deconstructive spirit and the interlacing of two entropies is obvious; therefore, if construed in the deconstructive theory, the...