On The Black Humor Of The Crying Of Lot49by Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon (1937-) is a representative of American post-modernist writers whose works are mainly associated with black humor aiming to expose the chaos and corruption of the society. In the The Crying of Lot49, Pynchon’s second full-length novel, it develops itself around Oedipa’s quest for the Tristero System. As its unique post-modernism techniques of depicting the chaos of society, in depicting the absurd society in the novel, Pynchon employs black humor in it in order to reveal the chaos of the American society vividly.In order to analyze the embodiment of black humor in American literature in1960s, this thesis will take Pynchon’s second novel-The Crying of Lot49as an example. Compared with the traditional modern literature, the post-modernism novel depicts its hero’s characteristics either in a distinguished way or follows the same way as modernist writers. The protagonists in Pynchon’s novels appear to be a kind of mental chaos when they encounter the alienated energy from the outer space. In essence, the post-modernist protagonists have transferred from the traditional hero into an type of anti-hero. Under the description of Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot49, the anti-hero lives in a seemed ordered but practically a disordered society with their parody names embedded in it.The whole thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the thesis statement and the literature review for Pynchon and The Crying of Lot49. Chapter Two serves as the general definition of black humor and meanwhile introduces the alienated system-the background for the black humor. Chapter Three presents detailed analyses of black humor characterizations in The Crying of Lot49. This thesis studies the disordered plot and the tragic anti-hero characters. Chapter Four concentrates on its parody for the names in black humor. Chapter Five is the conclusion part and it points out the importance of analyzing the black humor in Thomas Pynchon’s creation-The Crying of Lot49.