COL49 The End is Near

[Samuel Moyer]

I want to quickly summarize the last six pages of the book and then get on
with some serious irrational decoding...

p177-8 Oedipa admits to herself that Pierce actually is dead.  Now walking
down the railroad tracks, looking at factories she thinks:

    There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries.  No
    one knew yet how to draw them.  She had dedicated herself, weeks
    ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never
    suspecting that the legacy was America.  (178)


    He (Inverarity) might himself have discovered The Tristero, and
    encrypted that in the will, buying into just enough to be sure she'd
    find it. (179)


    Yet she knew, head down, stumbling along over the cinderbed and
    its old sleepers, there was still that other chance.  That it was all
true.
    That Inverarity had only died, nothing else.  Suppose, God, there
    really was a Tristero then and that she had come on it by accident.
(179)

Not that anyone needs reminding, but this isn't the first time Oedipa thinks
through all the possibilities....  But this time, one of the possibilities
doesn't include her being mad.

Onward...

    She remembered now old Pullman cars, left where the money'd run out...
(179)

I like that line.

    Were the squatters in touch with others, through Tristero; were they
    helping carry forward that 300 years of house disinheritance?  Surely
    they'd forgotten by now what it was the Tristero were to have inherited?
    as perhaps Oedipa one day might have.  What was left to inherit?
    That America coded in Inverarity's testament, whose was that? (180)

Getting Philisophical on us now...well, this is all very good reading... p.
180.. I am tempted to type the whole thing out.  There it is... the American
Dream.  I will try to come back to this... but feel free, anyone, really...

    She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to
    be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances
    once so good for diversity?  (181)


    Either Oedipa in the orbiting extacy of a true paranoia, or a real
Tristero.
    For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy
    America, or there was just America and if there was just America then
    it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all
    relevent to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into
    some paranoia. (182)

The novel ends with Oedipa showing up a few minutes early to the Auction.
The doors close and the bidding is about to start.  Now she waits for the
Crying of Lot 49.

Sam