The Crying of Lot 49 拍卖第49号 英文版.docVIP

The Crying of Lot 49《拍卖第49号》 Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of this Thomas Pynchon novel, lives in a world full of haphazard clues, dead ends, and meaningless signifiers. She stumbles through a bizarre string of coincidences to try to unravel what may or may not be a mystery. She cannot quite realize her condition....theyll call it paranoia Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.1Oedipa struggles to draw meaning out of chaotic masses of information, and to construct a narrative out of randomness. In doing so, she begins to lose sense of her world. She considers two possibilities: Another mode of meaning behind the obvious or none.2She suspects there may be more to life, that there may be something signified after all, but, if there is, it is continually deferred. We leave Oedipa waiting.Oedipa,pite her lack of success, is driven towards discovery. She chases a transcendental meaning the existence of which she cannot be certain, but she pursues. Without pursuit, there is waiting. Hers is an America of drifters and squatters, ones and zeroes, speeding electricity and dead railroad cars, and the search for the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word.3 Waiting, moving... 1 one summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million collars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work. She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just b