The Crying of Lot 49 Chapter 6
I don't remember the last time I came close as I did to throwing a book at a wall as I did after finishing this book. The ending was annoyingly cliche, but to be honest I wasn't that surprised the novel ended this way. After reading for six chapters about clues that trails that seem to end nowhere, it would be fitting for the title to be so casually tacked on to the end of the novel. I had considered the title to be somehow connected to the car lot Mucho had worked at, which had apparently meant a lot to him ("He had believed too much in the lot, he believe not at all in the station" (6)), but I mostly gave up on that idea at the end of Chapter 5 when Mucho left. In a way, the title represents the book as a whole: a question that persists throughout the book with an annoyingly unsatisfying answer revealed at the very end.
While I still define most mysteries like Auden does in The Guilty Vicarage, this definition obviosly does not apply to this novel. Although the novel is filled with crimes and morally questionable behavior, there is no central murder or crime that Oedipa is trying to solve and no murderer or perpetrator to reveal and catch. However, I still think this story is a mystery story. While Auden's definition is similar to what I usually think of when I think about mysteries, I think a mystery, at its core, is simply a search for answers and a mystery story details the search for those answers. Mysteries don't need to be resolved (though that might end up annoying readers like me), and some questions just don't have nice answers or even a proper answer at all.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I think this story has some interesting existential aspects. I don't know the subject that well, but I feel that Oedipa's search for a meaning in all of the clues and trails that she finds mirrors a person's search for meaning in an inherently meaningless world. Oedipa even realizes this in Chapter 6, when she realizes that everything she found might just be a cruel final joke that Pierce played on her. I'm not exactly sure if that was Pynchon's intent, but either way I think the connection to somewhat interesting.
While I still define most mysteries like Auden does in The Guilty Vicarage, this definition obviosly does not apply to this novel. Although the novel is filled with crimes and morally questionable behavior, there is no central murder or crime that Oedipa is trying to solve and no murderer or perpetrator to reveal and catch. However, I still think this story is a mystery story. While Auden's definition is similar to what I usually think of when I think about mysteries, I think a mystery, at its core, is simply a search for answers and a mystery story details the search for those answers. Mysteries don't need to be resolved (though that might end up annoying readers like me), and some questions just don't have nice answers or even a proper answer at all.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I think this story has some interesting existential aspects. I don't know the subject that well, but I feel that Oedipa's search for a meaning in all of the clues and trails that she finds mirrors a person's search for meaning in an inherently meaningless world. Oedipa even realizes this in Chapter 6, when she realizes that everything she found might just be a cruel final joke that Pierce played on her. I'm not exactly sure if that was Pynchon's intent, but either way I think the connection to somewhat interesting.
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