Crying of lot 49

There are two levels of apprehension to The Crying of Lot 49: that of the characters in the book, whose perception is limited to the text, and that of the reader, who has the ability to look at the world from outside of it. A recurring theme in the novel is the phenomenon of chaos, also called entropy. Both the reader and Oedipa have the same problems of facing the chaos around them. Through various methods, …

…novel, we will reach many conclusions which we might later realize to be false. Our inability to decipher symbols relates to Oedipa¡¦s inability to decipher the truth amongst chaos. In both cases, we need to increase the communicative entropy of our world. Nonetheless , The Crying of Lot 49 succeeds in actively involving the reader within the mystery of the text, thus we can learn something about ourselves as we discover what Oedipa learns of herself.