Watts and 49

This article was quite the read. Aside from being written by Pynchon, he gives us a new way of reading and thinking about the literature that we encounter with these two pieces and the contrast between them. I would like to compare these two pieces to a maze or a journey. In Lot 49, Pynchon takes the reader on a journey with twists and turns, dead ends, and ultimately we wait at the gate at the end of the maze hoping to find a conclusion or the end that we have been waiting on throughout the entire book, or searching for in my maze analogy. In the Watts essay I surprisingly found this maze to be easier to navigate through. I actually didn't know what to expect when first glancing at this essay but soon was extremely captivated by the subject matter. For one this essay seemed to be fiction but focused in on some very non-fiction issues, racial discrimination and the injustices in our so called justice system. Upon reading this essay my heart went out the character who was shot in the car and even more so for the wife for having to witness her husband's death right before giving birth to their child, and also having to witness the cop who murdered, notice the word choice, not accidentally shot, but murdered her husband be released of charges and go free like it never happened. I happened to sympathize with this character more so than Oedipa in Lot 49. Maybe because race plays a fair part in my empathy and certain circumstances of the characters.Or maybe, for example, I didn't quite "feel" Oedipa's struggle of being a house wife and having to execute a will for her passed loved one. Perhaps because I have never been in that situation to have to do such a thing and maybe because I am dishing out thousands of dollars for my education and I be damned if I become a housewife who is sheltered from the realities of world. Aside from identifying with the characters, I identified with the read. It not only honed in on some racial issues that still readily affect us, but like in Lot 49 went off into tangents about them and made the reader think about the text more analytically then literally. Classic Pynchon. Also a similarity that screamed Pynchon was the naming of the characters. Wasn't it quite ironic that the name of the man that was killed was Leonard Deadwyler? However, we can create a contrast between the two pieces with this naming theory. In Lot 49 the naming of the characters seemed to have no correlation with the story plot of them at all, unlike this piece. Also we can compare the fact that in this work as Pynchon works through the plot of the story we seem to get lost as to what that really is, only grasping on to some of the ideas in the story. Nonetheless, although confusing at times, I seemed to grasp this story better than Lot 49 while being taken through this endless maze of Thomas Pynchon.

Crying of Lot 49?

This text was by far a challenge to say the least. Not only were the paragraphs wordy but the content was by far confusing and near impossible to keep up with for the entire reading of this novel. After reading the first page I was thinking to myself, "I can do this, not too bad," but upon turning page after page I soon learn that this will be no ordinary novel. My first glimpse of this sudden reality was the peculiar naming of the characters. For one, the name Oedipa seemed to sound vaguely familiar, and I soon realized it was familiar because of the strong relation that the name has to the famous Shakespeare character Oedipus. Then we go on in the novel to encounter such characters as Mucho, Dr. Hilarious, and Mike Fallopian. Therefore, as reading this novel I was hoping to come across some type of correlation and analogy between the names and an underlined theme or message throughout the story but found no connection, only adding to the novel's satiral value. However, aside from the obvious allusions to the wars mentioned here and there in the chapters, it could be concluded that this novel was picked for this class because in rhetoric we all tell stories, argue opinions, pose suggestions and offer literary analysis of many of the texts that we encounter, and this novel was no exception. It forces us to think (rather deeply, i must say) and attempt to decipher and come to conclusions about the imposed meaning of the texts that we analyze. In this case, not only was the story difficult and frustrating, not to mention drawn out, the way that the information is presented is a journey all in itself. I found this text difficult to keep up with and often times got so lost in the words that I completely forgot what it was that those difficult words were describing. In this text, I believe that as the reader manuevers through the text just as Oedipa did, with confusion and by paying as much attention to detail as possible. Then just as the story ends and Oedipa is about to get her final ending with the solving of the mysterious informed bidder,we are left with the uncertainty of a solved mystery as the story ends. This could certainly be compared to the feeling that Oedipa might have felt as she sat awaiting the crying of lot 49, a hope for a resolution that may not come. However, upon realizing this, we also can not ignore that the audiences suspense is cut short by the resolution that certainly does not come. Nevertheless, I couldn't help but notice that the way that we as students have been trained to analyze text is very structured, and that was exactly what I found myself attemping to do throughout the entire novel. Trying to find allusions and correlations between the novel and my sense of reality but found not much more than big pile of confusion and wordy sentances, and few conclusions along the way...although that's more than I can say for this novel.