Less is Filling, More Tastes Great!

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

chris writes:
"nowhere in Lot 49 is                        
there a clue provided by the narrator as to what his work is all
about.  Lot 49 is built around elipsis and the unspoken, while in
GR we get endless reminders about bureaucracy, mythology and
Fascism, induistrial life, simple metaphors about epistemology in
scientific terms (calculus and particle physics and entropic
theory).  GR doesn't really leave much to the imagination--
everything the novel wants to say it says, clear and upfront.
For all its encyclopediac references and vanishing plotlines and
massiveness, this is actually the simplest and most easily
understood Pynchon novel, because the narrator does all the work
for us."


Well, actually, LOT49 *does* do a lot of that stuff, but it is relayed through
the consciousness and perceptions of Oedipa.  One of the *big* challenges on
GR, on the other hand, is figuring out where the narrator ends and the 
character's consciousness begins--or where one character ends and another picks
up.


Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)