In Reality: Postmodernists’ Puzzles While Lot 49 was published in 1966, as the development and gradual maturity of modern media enabled the mass to access a much wider range of knowledge than before, the American literature as well as society was undergoing great foment. Protests among college students to stand against the Vietnam War, decadent and faithless style of writing during the time of the “lost generation”. Ontological crisis swept through every aspect of life, and distrust and skepticism generated subversive forces to seek a revolution. In literature, the postmodernists were doing experiments on the function of the literal embodiment under the belief that, as everything had been said before, the structural reform in language was …show more content…
Whether it’s good or evil, optimistic or pessimistic, eventually it’s the discussions about ourselves and we could still feel the warmth and emotional resonance while reading. However, the postmodernists believed that “reality” should be redefined subjectively, and the definition varied as different people possessed distinctive patterns of experience and memories. For instance, in Lot 49, the director Randolph Driblette tells Oedipa that his remake of Wharfinger’s play is to “give the spirit flesh” (P 79). Driblette believes that the words are mere “rote noises to hold line bashes with”, and he conceives Wharfinger’s play as supplying “words and a yarn” where he objectifies them and “[gives] them life” (P 79, P 80). The words spoken by Driblette are actually messages from Pynchon to present readers the pattern of meaning and leave the readers to develop their own theories about the meaning itself. Furthermore, through the objectification of the characters, novelists were able to weave them together into a larger “pattern” of this world and consider events as