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Essay Archive - Crying of Lot 49
Crying of Lot 49
The philosophy behind all Pynchon novels lies in the synthesis of
philosophers and modern physicists. Ludwig Wittgenstein viewed the world
as a "totality of facts, not of things."1 This idea can be combined with
a physicist's view of the world as a closed system that tends towards
chaos. Pynchon asserts that the measure of the world is its entropy.2 He
extends this metaphor to his fictional world. He envelops the reader,
through various means, within the system of The Crying of Lot 49.
Pynchon designed The Crying of Lot 49 so that there would be two levels of
observation: that....
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