Having been named executor of her late boyfriend＇s estate. Oedipa Maas. the protagonist, a housewife, started her journey and soon found herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meeting some extremely interesting ...Having been named executor of her late boyfriend＇s estate. Oedipa Maas. the protagonist, a housewife, started her journey and soon found herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meeting some extremely interesting and absurd characters, quite beyond her imagination and self-knowledge. These characters came from different walks of life and social classes, but all have some defects and deficiencies in one way or another, both physically or mentally. Meanwhile, they seemed to be busy involving themselves in some ridiculous and meaningless tasks or missions of work or life, lingering and struggling, with uncertainty and hopelessness for the future. In this way. Pynchon＇s The Crying of Lot 49 presents us a chaotic and meaningless postmodern society which gradually turns into decadence and entropy. These absurd and pathetic characters were exactly, without doubt, both products and victims of this materialized, alienated and depressing postmodern society. The fiction is humorous, obscure, and very complicated, involving politics, history., religion, science and art etc.. This paper is to analyse the absurdity of some main characters in this fiction.展开更多
Living and creating in the tumultuous decades from the 1960s through 1980s, Thomas Pynchon unfalteringly chooses the countercultural and civil rights movements in the United States of that age as the permanent topic o...Living and creating in the tumultuous decades from the 1960s through 1980s, Thomas Pynchon unfalteringly chooses the countercultural and civil rights movements in the United States of that age as the permanent topic of his fiction. It can be seen from Pynchon＇s dramatic, sometimes fantastic narratives about these movements that the failure of the countercultural movements lies in their illusive nature in contrast with the hypocrisy and disproportionate power of the government to destruct these movements, and that the presence of American racial problems results to a great degree from the sloth prevailing over various institutions in American society when dealing with racial inequality and from American white racists＇ desire to eliminate an imagined threat in the face of the minorities. This paper tries to provide a different understanding that Pynchon＇s writing of the marginalized or surrealistic issues in these countercultural and civil rights movements is his strategy to expose the falsehood of American myth of democracy.展开更多
文摘Having been named executor of her late boyfriend＇s estate. Oedipa Maas. the protagonist, a housewife, started her journey and soon found herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meeting some extremely interesting and absurd characters, quite beyond her imagination and self-knowledge. These characters came from different walks of life and social classes, but all have some defects and deficiencies in one way or another, both physically or mentally. Meanwhile, they seemed to be busy involving themselves in some ridiculous and meaningless tasks or missions of work or life, lingering and struggling, with uncertainty and hopelessness for the future. In this way. Pynchon＇s The Crying of Lot 49 presents us a chaotic and meaningless postmodern society which gradually turns into decadence and entropy. These absurd and pathetic characters were exactly, without doubt, both products and victims of this materialized, alienated and depressing postmodern society. The fiction is humorous, obscure, and very complicated, involving politics, history., religion, science and art etc.. This paper is to analyse the absurdity of some main characters in this fiction.
文摘Living and creating in the tumultuous decades from the 1960s through 1980s, Thomas Pynchon unfalteringly chooses the countercultural and civil rights movements in the United States of that age as the permanent topic of his fiction. It can be seen from Pynchon＇s dramatic, sometimes fantastic narratives about these movements that the failure of the countercultural movements lies in their illusive nature in contrast with the hypocrisy and disproportionate power of the government to destruct these movements, and that the presence of American racial problems results to a great degree from the sloth prevailing over various institutions in American society when dealing with racial inequality and from American white racists＇ desire to eliminate an imagined threat in the face of the minorities. This paper tries to provide a different understanding that Pynchon＇s writing of the marginalized or surrealistic issues in these countercultural and civil rights movements is his strategy to expose the falsehood of American myth of democracy.
