Chapter Summary Of Crying A Lot

Improved Essays
I am going to summarize and analyze the novel named ‘’The Crying a Lot’’. This novel belongs to Thomas Pynchon who is one of the best in postmodernist literature. I will explain 1960s period, short summarize of book and communication problem in the novel.
Firstly I want to start with short entrance about the period when Thomas Pynchon wrote this novel. He is an American postmodern novelist. His novels contains lots of question. It was written in the 1960s. In this decade there were lots of problems like drug problem, Vietnam War, rock evolution. This was also the decade of John Kennedy’s and Martin Luther’s assassination. At the same time the period of women’s rights. This book is related with this period that it contains lots of chaos; indeed,
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One day she takes a letter that mentioned about her ex-boyfriend Pierce died and he devoted Oedipe as a guardian. And then, Oedipe decided to fulfill his will, take the road to San Narciso and then finds herself in a mysterious world. She was believing to solve a big mystery that increasingly abstracted from the world and will be buried loneliness. Oedipa’s world become a place that based on dreams, drugs and conspiracy theories.
In the end, the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds herself alienated from that society. The drug culture plays a big role in this sense of isolation. The world around Oedipa seems to be a world consistently on drugs, manic and full of conspiracies and illusions. And though that world is exciting and new, it is also dangerous: drugs contribute to the destruction of Oedipa's marriage, and drugs cause to go insane. Oedipa hallucinates so often that she seems to be constantly high, and ultimately, this brings her nothing but a sense of chaotic
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Many of the problems with chaos found in the novel are engaged to the idea of communication. The main symbol of order in the novel, Maxwell's Demon, can’t be operated because it requires a certain unachievable level of communication. Letters in the novel, which should be clear and direct forms of communication, are meaningless. The novel also contains a mail-delivery group that requires its members to mail a letter once a week even if they have nothing to say. Indeed, the letter Oedipa receives in chapter one may itself be meaningless, since it is the first step in what may be nothing more than a big joke played on Oedipa. The religious moment Oedipa experiences in chapter two seems for a moment to promise the possibility of some kind of communication being communicated, but the process breaks down. Religion, language, science, all of the purveyors of communication, and through that communication a sense of wholeness, do not correctly function in the

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