Mosaic of Citations - Book Report/Review Example

In the latter, Pynchon weaves a complex tale which deals with the human need for certainty in what is in fact a very uncertain world: and the concomitant need to create conspiracy theories to explain everything. The intertextuality of The Crying of Lot 49 is to be found initially within the very names of the characters. The main "protagonist" of the novel is a woman called Oedipa Maas. This is obviously a reference to one of the most famous, and influential texts of all time, the Greek play Oedipus Rex.

The word "Oedipa" brings a whole series of references within the reader's mind, particularly to the well-known "Oedipus Complex" that all men are meant to experience. This is of course a particularly male reference, i.e. the desire to kill one's father and make love to one's mother. Placed within a female character, Pynchon uses the word "Oedipa", a humorous feminized version of the word Oedipus, to constantly distance the reader. The use of pastiche and collage continues with the mixture of historical and fictional elements within the same book.

Thus Pynchon uses a supposed conflict between two postal companies, Thurn und Taxis and Tristero , a conflict that Oedipa is investigating, in an interesting manner. The former actually existed, and was the first private postal company to deliver mail, the latter only exists within the play, The Courier's Tragedy, which Oedipa is investigating. The name of this play also has a kind of literary resonance and referentiality: it sounds very much like a play that should have been written in Elizabethan times, or perhaps even a lost tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The fact that it uses the word "courier" presents an ironic, anachronistic quality to it as "courier" seems to be such a modern word. This mixture of times, places and literary references produces an oddly disjointed, alienated sense for the reader (Brownlie, 2000). Ancient references are mixed with ultra-modern takes upon the 1960's culture that Pynchon wrote the novel within. Thus there is a band called The Paranoids, who are a satirical take on the whole counter-culture, drug society of California and New York during the 1960's.

The name of this band will sound 'familiar' to the reader because it is similar to many other band names of the period (most notably The Beatles), but in fact never existed. In similar fashion, the reader may think they have heard of the town of Kinneret in California, even though it does not exist. Part of the reason for this familiarity is the fact that real cities, such as the infamous Berkeley, California are mentioned within the plot. In many ways, this novel may be regarded as similar to a room for of multiple mirrors covering the walls and ceilings.

Being present within it will provide an overwhelming sense of reality, and yet one that is difficult to pin down. A similar experience awaits the reader in Slaughterhouse 5. The disorientating feature of this novel is the fact that the main character is "unstuck in time" (Vonnegut, 1999): that is, he lives his life in no apparent order, constantly switching between different periods without any chronological order. For Vonnegut this was an attempt to explain the random cruelty of a world in which events such as the needless bombing of Dresden