The Road To Immortality

In Chapter 4 of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 I noticed how the author targeted immortality and gave his insight about achievement-related immortality. Pynchon states that we are taught that America’s great inventors were those individuals which followed the rule of “only one man per invention“ (70).This idea of being taught that the big inventors received all the credit and that their lives revolved around these achievements ties with the idea of being left alone to discover, thus building up a perfect roadmap for inventors to follow. Pynchon shows that this is not true in the big companies, where great inventors get “stuck on some ‘project’ or ‘task force’ or team’ and started being ground to anonymity” (70). Pynchon makes fun of how we are an achievement-based society, where problems occur due to the necessity to be someone due to our actions, our obligation as individuals in a community to do something we are good at, hoping to receive all the credit for the innovative ideas we can come up with.

Pynchon also talks about how we think our death will make us immortal in a Gilgamesh kind of way, how we believe we will become immortal due to our actions. Oedipa states that it is as “if the dead even do persist, even in a bottle of wine” (79). It is this immortality belief, the patent-holder idea of achieving an immortal name which Pynchon talks about. His target is Oedipa who is characterized by her thinking simple concepts over and over again. We are shown how this whole thing of action driven immortality signifies nothing but a desperate, lame strategy to be something we can’t achieve otherwise, immortality. It is this kind of thoughts that build up Pynchon’s writing. The abstract reasoning and comical scenes build on a fact-based framework which gives the reader an opportunity to have a relaxed time with the book. How will Pynchon continue Oedipa’s adventures to become a business expert? What will become Pynchon’s satire main target?