On Time And Space In Pynchon's V.

Thomas Pynchon (1937- ) is an influential novelist in the contemporary American literature. His fiction attracts much attention from critics. His first novel V. won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel of the year when it was published. Pynchon's fiction is difficult to understand. The time and space are always changeable. The time Pynchon stressed is in the past and at present. The past is often with background of historical events of disaster. People"enter into"the past when they try to search their own past, but this kind of search is in vain. Pynchon emphasizes the spatial form in his fiction. There is a theme behind the broken-up confusion. Readers have to connect the plots scattered all over the novel so that they can have a unitary impression of it. When dealing with time in V., Pynchon emphasizes the effect of the historical disasters on the lives at present. V's identity is a mystery; it connects with historical disaster every time it appears. Stencil's search of V is a way to keep his energetic and meaningful life. The quest for V is also a quest and explanation for self-identity and mankind's disastrous history. Since Profane has no apparent past, he lives his life aimlessly and feels alien in his own country. When depicting the space, there are spatial forms like parallel of plots, repetition of the theme, multi-leveled stories and satire as that in the modern fiction. By paralleling the plots as the two major lines: Stencil's search and Profane's yo-yoing, the animate and the inanimate society, the decadent life of the Whole Sick Crew above the ground and the insane priest Father Fairing's preaching to rats underground , Pynchon reveals the stagnant and inanimateness in the postwar America especially in the mid-50s. This kind of life is a result that mankind's entropic tendency. Entropy is an implied theme of the novel. There are increase of entropy value and the death of man's spirit. The multi-leveled stories and the satire are also embodying entropy. Pynchon shows his worry about mankind's entropic tendency and his concern on the living conditions of man.