Alienation In The Crying Of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon, one of the representative postmodern American writers, is famous for his obscure and dense style. Despite their difficulty, his writings covey a deep humanistic concern about people's living conditions in his time. In his novella, The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon portrays an America in the early 1960s, when people's life was caught in between material prosperity and spiritual emptiness. At the mercy of the controlling forces manipulated secretly by capitalist production and consumption in a post-industrial society, the American people, especially those marginalized ones, became increasingly aware of a sense of alienation. Through a textual analysis informed by Fromm's theories of alienation and love, not without a reference to the social background, this thesis would focus on the total alienation revealed in the novella, exploring its causes and Pynchon's tentative therapies for this problem.This thesis is made up of five parts. In the first part there is the literature review of the previous and current studies on Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and a summary of Erich Fromm's theories on alienation. Chapter one sets its focus on a textual analysis of the total alienation depicted in the novella in fields from the characters' work place, entertainment life, personal relationships to their relationship with the self, so as to represent the novella as a panorama, painted by Pynchon, of alienation in the post-industrial America. Chapter two explores the possible causes of this total alienation. It attributes this mode of experience to the social background of that age to reveal the dominant powers that coerce the society into conformity. Pynchon intimates the existence of hegemony in postmodern society with its new form of anonymous authority, which cloaks itself under the lie of democracy as well as the myth of American dream. Moreover, unsatisfied with depicting only the postmodern America, Pynchon traces all along the country's history by the juxtaposition of various historical fragments and points out the colonial thinking pattern in American Puritanism based on the binary opposition of the Elect and the Preterite. Chapter three attempts to find out Pynchon's experimental therapy for alienation contained in this novella. This chapter pays close attention to Oedipa's quest as her process of initiation, taking advantage of her role as a witness of the counter forces in the aliens. Through the textual analysis of the rebellion of the countercultural groups and the symbolism of Tristero, the chapter concludes Pynchon's therapy as love, communication and probability.As a conclusion, in his depiction of the panorama of postmodern American society, Pynchon, with a humanistic concern, uncovers the persistent oppression from the ruling power which leads to the total alienation and gives his tentative therapy. Based on his positive-yet-sober understanding of the postmodern America, Pynchon may suggest that human consciousness need not be trapped by entropic drift and the future may be still pregnant with a glimpse of promise.