Entropy and the Fantastic: Chaos and Disorder in the Crying of Lot 49 of Thomas Pynchon
Yuna Li1, Pingdingshan2, Jit Pal Aggarwal3
1Yuna Li, Ph.D Researcher, Lovely Professional University, Phagwara (Punjab), India.
2Pingdingshan, University, China.
3Jit Pal Aggarwal, Associate Professor, Lovely Professional University, Phagwara (Punjab), India.
Manuscript received on 03 May 2019 | Revised Manuscript received on 15 May 2019 | Manuscript Published on 23 May 2019 | PP: 321-324 | Volume-7 Issue-6S5 April 2019 | Retrieval Number: F10530476S519/2019©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: Thomas Pynchon is an American postmodernism novelist who scrapped the 19th century view of optimism and turned to science and technology to explore the causes and symptoms the modern malaise afflicting the contemporary Americans. His novels depict the postmodernist techniques of ironies, paradox, and the self conscious style expressing relation to a world in which unity is replaced by a baffling multiplicity. Thomas Pynchon was influenced by Henry Adams’s Education (1905) which describes the lack of certainties in the modern world. Pynchon deals with a deterministic order; he talks of spontaneity in which contradictory possibilities co-exist. Norbert Wiener published his book The Human Use of Human Beings (1967) in which he propounded the theory of decline, death and disorder operating in the universe. Pynchon was greatly impacted by the theory of entropy and decline as Weiner observes: “the universe is running downhill” (58). Entropy is a measuring rod of that decline and in all his major novels such as V, (1961), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Bleeding Edge (2013) Pynchon depicts the process of death, decline and disorder of the universe and man’s confrontation with the chaos. Pynchon turned to science and philosophy and used the metaphor of entropy to depict the process of the end of human civilization.
Keywords: Chaos, Entropy, Confrontation, Disorder, Deterministic, Postmodernism, Multiplicity.
Scope of the Article: Social Sciences