The relationship between science and nature in Frankenstein - Essay Example

Written in the middle of the 1960s, Pynchon was reflecting a culture gone crazy in which meaning was lost in the chaotic shuffle of Civil Rights, women’s rights, the Vietnam War and numerous other world-shaking events. While names such as Oedipa Maas, Mucho Maas and Pierce Inverarity do convey meaning of a sort regarding the personalities of these characters, they do not help in identifying a ‘constellation’ within the novel. Oedipa Maas is the protagonist of the story who is shaken out of her humdrum relatively normal California suburbia lifestyle with the news that her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, has named her the executor of his will.

There is an undeniable connection between her name and the name of a legendary king of Thebes from a play by Socrates. In Socrates’ play, the main character, Oedipus, learns that there is a great mystery that no one has yet been able to solve and sets out to answer the question of who killed the old king only to learn to his own ruin that it was Oedipus himself. In much the same way, Oedipa learns of a mystery that no one else has yet been able to solve – the mystery of the Trystero. In attempting to solve the mystery, which may actually be no mystery at all, Oedipa loses connection with her own life thus finding nothing but her own ruin at the end of the hunt.

Her almost hallucinatory night spent wandering the streets of the city seems to suggest the type of blind wandering that Oedipus embarked upon at the end of his story. “She stood between the public booth and the rented car, in the night, her isolation complete, and tried to face toward the sea. But she’d lost her bearings. She turned, pivoting on one stacked heel, could find no mountains either” (177). Having lost touch with the people in her life, she could no longer even find herself within the landscape.

Her last name, Maas, has several possible connotations including its synonym, mass which is traditionally difficult to get