The Difficulties

As I read through the first few chapters of Thomas Pynchon's work, I felt as if I was reading one long run-on sentence. I found myself skimming over the same line repeatedly just to understand introductory descriptions of new characters and Oedipa's revelations.

However, these "difficulties" are nothing more but a personal limitation that I would eventually overcome as I progressed through the book. I became interested by the usage of terms that I'd find in my textbook for classical electrodynamics in effort to create similes and metaphors. For example, the mention of electric field lines in Oedipa's revelation at the end of chapter one. I mention this because the major difficulty I had with this book was its way of expressing communication.

The sentences and paragraphs that confused me the most were those that contained meaningless and empty dialog (empty in the sense that I gained nothing useful from it). For example, as Oedipa drove to San Narciso in chapter two, she begins to have another revelation that she describes as symbolic and religious. Just as it seems she's about to make a breakthrough, as if something important was to be revealed, her thought process deteriorated as she gave up on her religious moment. Moments like these throughout the novel denied me the chance of understanding the importance of Oedipa's motives, and in essence, leaving me entangled on a cliffhanger of unanswered questions. I relate this to the concept of the electric field, because at this moment, we do not know what an electric field is. We only know of its function and importance. Often textbooks skip over these definitions, going straight to the equations in vector notation. Therefore, I found it interesting that Pynchon would introduce physical concepts whose identities cannot be explained to attempt to provide explanations to questions that ultimately won't be solved.

This confusing communication argues a description of the structure of the late 60s. During the Vietnam War, life in the United States could be described as chaotic. Aside from anti-war tactics, shootings and protests, the era experienced Civil Rights movements, the assassination of a president, and LSD-25 among other things. Much in the same way as communication in Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 was difficult to interpret, so was the nature of the cultural and political disorder that swept through the nation.