"The Crying of Lot 49"

Paper Summary:

"The Crying of Lot 49" is a convoluted, complex novel that delves deeply into the fractured American national consciousness that began to emerge after the Vietnam War. The paper examines how Thomas Pynchon portrays this disintegration of the relative national unity and moral clarity of the post WWII days into an environment of ambivalence, drugs and madness in his novel.

From the Paper:

"The Crying of Lot 49 is thought by many to be Thomas Pynchon's greatest work. Under 200 pages long, it packs an incredible amount of complexity into a short space, forcing the reader to follow along closely in order to make any sense out of the plot. There are only a couple main characters, although the rest of the text is filled with brief cameos and one-dimensional figures that pop into the story line to serve a specific purpose and then disappear, leaving the reader with no real sense of character development. The book's convoluted plotline and vast, varied and overarching conspiracy theories create a sense of the unreal that continually builds, at first threatening to overrun the story and bog it down in confusion and chaos, but finally attaining enough momentum to push the story (and the reader) through to the end."

More papers on "The Crying of Lot 49":

• Term Paper # 97875 : "The Crying of Lot 49"
• Analytical Essay # 28106 : "Music in "The Crying of Lot 49"
• Book Review # 119055 : "Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: