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.