In Pynchon’s, The Crying of Lot 49, we are thrown into the life of a paranoid woman, Oedipa. At first she is a cliche of a woman; she literally starts the story off with returning home from a Tupperware party. We soon find that she is much more interesting than a cliche character as we follow Oedipa through a series of unfolding conspiracies that redefine and shape her life. It seems that her new found obsession with searching for the meaning of a sign called “the trystero” begins to give meaning to her life. She becomes so engrossed with finding out more about this sign that she relentlessly researches into and follow clues that will leader closer to the truth about the trystero. We find that in the end there is hardly any concrete meaning to the trystero; it is seen all throughout history and pertains to people of all spheres of life. This only leads Oedipa down a path of more questioning and fewer answers. Through this, we find that although she is able to find meaning or context about the trystero, there is still no real, concrete conspiracy that we can define clearly. Instead of the trystero being the definable image to a conspiracy, the trystero only leads us, and Oedipa down a road of more questioning. In one of Oedipa’s first encounters with discussing the trystero with Dribblet, she finds that he has an understanding about the …show more content…
She goes to a warehouse in Oakland and finds a book that has information of the trystero. In this book, she finds a definition of the trystero, however, it is not what she was looking for. In this book, she finds the phrase, “This trystero dies irae…” which she later finds “owing to no clear meaning of the trystero”(Pynchon, 82). Clearly, this search for the definition of trystero did about as much good as her previous searches had been. She was not able to find a real definition of the trystero; she was only able to find more questions about the