The Crying Of Lot 49 Chapter 5: Destiny’s Game

Today I got the news that one of my friends has his new driving license. I am really annoyed at everyone getting their license when they turn sixteen and feeling as if I am the only one that is already sixteen without this license. I have decided that I will take the course in the week of Thanksgiving. When I sometimes see people in the streets I am not sure of how prepared I am going o be to face the real traffic. I do know how to drive already and I am sure that it isn't a very big problem to drive myself around but I have seen some reckless driving in the streets that really leaves me astonished. When I see these kinds of drivers I start questioning the safety that people have around these excellent drivers that go in the wrong way to save themselves five minutes of traffic. I sometimes worry of the pedestrians that cross the street in the middle of the street where they are not supposed to cross. They are very irresponsible and sometimes cross as if there were no cars speeding by. The fact that young careless drivers have license really increases the percentages of accidents. In The Crying Of Lot 49 Oedipa is faced in a situation where she is almost killed thanks to the careless driving of a boy. According to Pynchon: "She drove more or less automatically until a swift boy in a Mustang, perhaps unable to contain the new sense of virility his auto gave him, nearly killed her" (pg.87). In this quotation I could see the word destiny written all over it. The boy nearly killed her but, he failed. That failure was done by destiny. The destiny of Oedipa is to execute Inverarity's will and to find out what this organization of W.A.S.T.E. is about. Since her destiny hadn't been fulfilled up to that moment then it was not meant for her to die. Pynchon might have meant with this quotation to show us how the task destiny has set us up to do is meant to be done. It doesn't matter how much you try to evade it and run from it you will end up doing what destiny has in mind for you.

WASTE is an underground organization of mail delivery not controlled in any sense by the government. When I first saw this problem I thought that the persons that invented this had to be very illegal and wanted to do something evil out of this invention. Then I said that mu conclusion was very basic and that I did not let the members of this WASTE mail explain their reasons. If was a person in a world where all the mail I sent was read and censored by the government I would also be very upset. All the privacy that is meant to be used when people write letters is lost. What will happen next is that people will start to put secret codes and messages to try to get their private and personal messages across to the recipient without the government knowing. If this were to happen then it would become really complicated to write letters. The main purpose of letters is to provide communication between people. If the codes start to flow in and the governmental censors then the communication will be lost. After seeing this scenario that I made up that was the most possible scenario of those people that made up WASTE I concluded that if I was among those people I would have also done an underground postal system. A woman that is saying good-bye to her son in the airport said "Write by WASTE, remember. The government will open it if you use the other" (pg.100). What she said is really the problem that happened in that time and it was that the government managed to view all the information that people communicated.