system, but also on old postage stamps-perhaps forged. The muted horn (the stoppage of communication) appears on the postage stamp of the W.A.S.T.E. The central mystery in Lot 49 is the symbol of the muted horn, which appears linked to an underground mail system (known as W.A.S.T.E.), and is also associated with a mysterious historical group known as The Trystero. As in V, it is impossible to know what really happened in history, or even to distinguish fact from forgery in historical texts. Lot 49 is largely a meditation on the failure of communication, both in the present, and between generations. Pierce, who leaves behind a vast, mysterious estate for Oedipa to sort out, reminds us of earlier proto-God figures such as the Father in Swift’s Tale of a Tub (whose sons, Peter and Martin, rewrite his will-The Bible-to suit their own ends), or Beckett’s Godot, who is also supposed to supply all the answers yet is incommunicado. His name, like so many names in Pynchon’s works, is intended to suggest something-or is it? Inverarity, with its echoes of veritas, suggests something other than truth, perhaps the elusiveness of truth. In Lot 49, Oedipa Maas is the questing protagonist, the surprisingly chosen executrix of the will of her now-deceased ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. Nor can the protagonist even be sure whether the symbols mean anything, or are in fact a part of a great conspiracy. In Lot 49, we are presented with historical mysteries and symbols that the protagonist cannot decipher. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon’s second novel, pursues many of the same themes Pynchon explored in his first novel, V.

The crying of lot 49 pages