The process of a story is in just one conversation where a person tells the other person what happened. The novel is meant to go slower in a more detailed manner while focusing on many other themes. The novel is also divided by chapters which make the reader have some sort of stops. This article is really what Oedipa's life has become. Before Oedipa's life was like a long novel where she did not have anything much to do. It was all monotonous and she almost had no communication with Mucho. Now her life had become a story. Her life was happening at incredible rates where she would drive around California searching for clues that lead to more information about WASTE. She had also met many people and had many strange events. One of these people that she met and helped her in some way to discover more about WASTE was the man from the bar called The Greek Way. At the end he was the only one Oedipa wanted to talk to. Oedipa was somehow wondering if all this clues and trying to solve the mystery was set up by Inverarity. The man from the bar said "It's too late" (pg.146), and when he said that I thought the same Oedipa thought. The question I would have asked then would be too late for what or for whom? He tells her that it was too late for him but did not explain anything more. Pynchon might have done this to leave a lot of room for interpretation to the reader. The reader now has to imagine what he meant. When I read this I thought that it was too late for her to retire of the case. She had gone too deep now in the knowing of the case that dropping now would be more difficult than not dropping. He also creates leaves the story with us really not knowing if all was a joke of Inverarity or it is true. In this way he creates two options but he never tells us which one is done.
A thing I noticed is that in some occasion Pynchon slips in his opinion about a certain subject in the novel. According to Pynchon: "The owner informed her that Zapf, the damn fool, has set fire to his own store for insurance" (pg.122). The first time I read this sentence I did notice that it says damn fool but I did not really care about it. Then when I saw that there was no one talking in this quotation I looked back to see who was talking. When I noticed it was the narrator that said that to the owner of the shop I noticed that Pynchon had some sort of hate for Zapf. We do not know who Zapf is but we know that Pynchon is not very fond of this character. The other thing I noticed that Pynchon included in this quotation was the materialistic thinking of people. How can one set on fire its shop just to get some money? I think that this person did not care how much spiritual value his shop full of books and his work life had. We are sometimes too much driven for power and money that we tend to forget the spiritual side. Pynchon might have included this quotation to show the greed of human kind and how people will do anything for money.
No comments:
Post a Comment