Building An Unfinished Mystery

As Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49, comes to an end we are shown the nature of the title and the last bits of information that Pynchon wanted to include in his satirical, strange novel. I must say that I was disappointed when I read the last sentence of Pynchon’s novel: “Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49” (152). With this Pynchon leaves an open-ended novel which surely works with the difficulties in communication both between Oedipa with the world and the reader with the book. Pynchon gives the reader the opportunity to build the rest of the story in his own mind, to simply find the answer to the mystery as we weren’t allowed to know. We were Pynchon’s puppets in the book, the characters that have feelings but can’t create on what is being built in front of their eyes. They can see how Pynchon gives Oedipa the motives to be lost in the mystery, as she discovers that Pierce owned everything in town, all the businesses that were necessary to build his master joke.

In the Crying of Lot 49 Wiki webpage I found a video which shows the main problematic that the book deals with. It shows recurrent themes of the book like drug use, misunderstanding, and cultural aspects of 1960’s California to give us a representation of what the literal part of the book shows. The main adventures that Oedipa lives in the novel are portrayed in a way that my own mind was imagining them. The sudden changes in shots give the viewer a unique perspective of the events, there seems to always be more than the symbols employed to represent Oedipa’s adventures. The final shot shows the hammer of the auction, an accurate representation of Pynchon’s ending, the abrupt open-ended final.

Genghis tells Oedipa that they “say an auctioneer ‘cries’ a sale” (151). This gives the readers the last clue into the mystery, the crying of the auctioneer resembles that of the misunderstandings we have seen through the book. The problems that have been created due to the lack of information given to both Oedipa and the reader become a cry for information, for that feeling that Pynchon creates when leaving an open-ended novel for us. We are thus given the opportunity to observe and make fun of the adventures of a human being that has become fond in our hearts, while attacking this feeling of misunderstanding. Is life like a big misunderstanding of a simple event? Are we like miniscule Oedipas in our own, unique adventures? Is there a Pierce in our lives?