Thomas Pynchon's Novel, The Crying of Lot 49

Despite this incommensurability, Oedipa seeks to create a metanarrative, a grand schema, that will define for her the truth. In short, she is seeking her own Maxwell's Demon.

But her own world lies completely shattered, very(prenominal) much like the smashed mirror in the jakes in Chapter 2, wherein she cannot find her reflection. Like Alice displaced into Wonderland, Oedipa has exited Kinneret, where society functioned as a whole, and she has entered (facelessly) into San Narciso, where unhinged narratives float (like the absurd characters Alice meets), and where she cannot, unlike Narcissus, look upon the unify image of her own face: "Things grew les and less clear. At near point she went into the bathroom, tried to find her image, but couldn't"(Pynchon, p.29).

It is Oedipa's quest, throughout the novel, to interchange the various narratives she encounters into a great picture, as if the pieces of a reciprocating saw puzzle.

But this is not possible in San Narciso, where narcissism heart not only perpetual self-reflection, but also siemens -- incommensurability -- the disintegration of all metanarratives; a move embodied in Tristero and the nameless man in the Greek Way: "There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding"(Lyotard

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