Blog #11

Blog #11
Ross Reed
4/18/11

Oedipa’s desire to become something important and make something of her self puts her in possibly a government conspiracy. Who would have guessed that there could be such a plot behind postal fraud. Oedipa in this chapter acts like wonder woman using her beauty and personal connections to find clues from all sorts of important men on Tristero.
I enjoyed reading about her tour of the manufacturing plant she took on a stockholders tour. Thomas Pynchon did a very good job describing the paranoid office scene in which Oedipa is overwhelmed by the situation.
“ Somehow Oedipa got lost. One minute she was gazing at a mockup of a space capsule, safely surrounded by old , somnolent men; the next, alone in a great, fluorescent murmur of office activity. As far as she could see in any direction it was white or pastel: men’s shirts, papers, drawing boards. All she could think of was to put on her shades for all this light, and wait for somebody to rescue her. But nobody Noticed.”
-( pg. 66)

Oedipa’s super agent personality really came into use when she wondered up upon Stanley Koteks. He was sitting at his desk drawling the symbol. Oedipa wanted to extract information out of Koteks so she tries to sound conspiratorial. Oedipa acting like a Charlie’s Angles girl eventually get Koteks to say too much information about his knowledge of the “ sensitives” and he realizes he had made a mistake.
Mr Toth’s scene is very influential for the plot, she is trying to find out if he knows anything of mysterious men who were bandits too the riders on the Pony Express. He recalls something about men dressed in black. Pynchon forgets to put a period after the “Mr” In Mr. Thoth’s name, there may be a reason for this but then on the other hand I can see Thomas Pynchon doing something like this just to mess with us and it has no significance at all.
In this week’s reading there seemed to be a theme of all of her clues coming to together. With the WASTE acronym, and the horn symbol, all of the clues found of the stamps there is definitely a common feeling that oedipa may have uncovered something big.