A Post-modernist Study Of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying Of Lot 49

Pynchon is one of the most prominent postmodern writers in America though so far he has only published six fictions and a collection of stories.He completed V in Mexico in 1963. With its publication,Pynchon's career as a novelist began.Continually Pynchon published his novels The Crying of Lot 49,Gravity's Rainbow,Vineland,Mason & Dixon and Against the Day.All of these novels are extremely successful.In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49,to fulfill her ex-boyfriend's will,the protagonist Oedipa,co-executes his estates.Finding there might be a big conspiracy,she starts her endless puzzling quest through reality and illusion.The novel is indeed a labyrinthine world with great amount of language signs,science conceptions,meaningless communications,etc.The labyrinthine world has neither center nor meaning,which is obviously one of the features of postmodern works.This paper explores the novel from the postmodernist view.The introduction explores Pynchon's life experience along with traces of the consequent influence on his writing.The methodology of this research and reviews of critics are introduced at the end of the introduction.In Chapter One,connotation of semiotic is explicated.It first explores the language code and sign embodied by specific things including clues and names of characters and places. Then it goes further to interpret the structure of the text from the view of semiology.Chapter Two focuses on the techniques Pynchon implements to construct the labyrinthine world.Two connotations of entropy and their connecting medium of Maxwell's Demon are mentioned in this chapter.Entropy contributes a lot to the labyrinthine world of The Crying of Lot 49.The entropic metaphor blurs the differentiation line between truth and untruth and makes untruth the truth.The Demon Device constructs a medium in which thermodynamic entropy and communication entropy frequently entangle and cross over into each other.This ambivalence continues to multiply into multiple meanings which advance to entwine a labyrinth that Pynchon seems so fond of. Chapter Three elaborates the transformation of labyrinth into an indeterminate process. Oedipa's quest for Tristero postal system,a quest clearly modeled after entropic process of communication,contains more confusion than revelation.What's more,revelation is to be followed by other kind of revelations that continuously confuse the character and the reader than enlighten them.Oedipa's encounters with a series of men neither bring her closer to Tristero System nor take her out of the tower,but put her down into a world of alienation, diversity and indeterminacy.The conclusion makes a summary of the main points in this dissertation:code,labyrinth and indeterminacy are the most obvious postmodern techniques adopted by Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49.