The Crying of Lot 49 Ending

Well, that was pretty wild. Personally, I liked the ending. If I ever write I book, I know I would want it to have a really unsatisfying ending. You can call me crazy for liking unsatisfying endings, but I think there is more meaning to them. Pynchon ended the book at this point for a reason. If he resolved the mystery, then the readers would think that the resolution was the purpose of the book. If we felt satisfied at the end, then we would feel comfortable putting the book down and moving on to the next one. Pynchon does not allow us to do this. He ended the book here, so we would understand that there is more to the book than one great solution. Now, we have to look at the confusing things, the seemingly insignificant things, the frustrating things to try to understand what Pynchon wants to tell the readers.

When I finished reading the book, I started thinking of different reasons why Pynchon may have ended the book when Oedipa is waiting for the crying of lot 49. As the readers, we want the mystery to have a satisfying conclusion. We want to see who the mystery bidder is. I realized how similar we are to Oedipa. Throughout the entire book, she obsesses over finding a solution, and we feel the same way because we want to know whether the mail conspiracy is real or not. However, Oedipa seems to let her expectations distract her from what is happening around her. This may be why the book is called The Crying of Lot 49. The crying of lot 49 is how Oedipa and the readers expect to find answers. We may be too focused on what should happen that we do not pay attention to anything else. When Oedipa sees the deaf-mutes, the men drag her into the ballroom and force her to dance (107). She does not understand how there are no collisions when they are dancing. It seems as if they are communicating, but she does not understand how they are communicating. People all around her seem to be communicating, but she is completely oblivious like she is oblivious to her surroundings because she is too focused on solving the mystery. 

One of the main focuses of this book is communication. I wonder if Pynchon just used the mail conspiracy to tell the readers to focus on the topic of communication in the book rather than focus on the mail conspiracy itself. The OED defines communication as "senses relating to affinity or association." The OED also defines communication as sexual intercourse. Oedipa tries to use her senses to understand her surroundings, but she does not focus on her surroundings as much because she is too focused on finding a solution instead of finding the pieces that lead to one. Mucho mentions the senses when he defends his use of LSD because "you hear and see things, even smell them, taste like you never could...You're an antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives a night" (118). The Crying of Lot 49 also has numerous references to intercourse with an explicit scene between Oedipa and Metzger at the beginning and other references to statutory rape and pedophilia. All of these contribute to what Pynchon may be trying to say about communication.

At the beginning of the semester, I expected to read a bunch of detective stories like Sherlock Holmes. My entire definition of the word "mystery" has changed since then. I now see the how there can be a mystery in the story without the story being a typical detective story. I also saw how books like Piers Plowman can be a mystery story even though it did not fit my original definition. Like I mentioned in this post, there are different ways to view a story. I can identify how characters and readers view real and false evidence. Oedipa does not know what is real and what is not, and identifying this is part of understanding the mystery in the story. With The Crying of Lot 49 and Piers Plowman, I realized that mysteries do not necessarily need a satisfying ending. Much of what we have read and discussed completely altered my perception of mystery stories, but I now feel that I have a greater understanding of how I can interpret stories and redefine what I thought would never change.

"communication, n.". OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37309?redirectedFrom=communication (accessed December 01, 2017).