COLGR49--famous first lines
jbor
jbor at bigpond.com
Wed Aug 1 06:41:21 CDT 2001
on 7/31/01 10:14 PM, Paul Mackin at paul.mackin at verizon.net wrote:
> One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party to
> find that she had been tranformed into Mr. Thomas Pynchon.
>
> Do I have it all wrong or does Oedipa in chapter 1 sound more like a
> wide-eyed twenties something recent Cornell graduate with a penchant for
> college humor than a somewhat jaded Penisula housewife? In any case it's
> good fun.
In support of this observation is the fact that Oedipa is virtually
androgynous. She is never described physically, and it's only when she looks
at herself in mirrors that we get any sense of her physicality at all.
Mirrors are symbolically significant in literature anyway, but I get an
impression also that Pynchon is looking at himself and aspects of his own
sheltered upbringing through Oedipa. The other thing to note is that even
though it is written in the third person the narration is filtered, for the
most part, through Oedipa's point of view: we see what she sees, we hear
what she hears, we get her thoughts, dreams and visions, impressions of
others, her attitudes, even her sensations (or lack thereof, as with
Roseman's barely-felt "footsie").
best
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