A Comparison of On the Road and Crying of Lot 49

In both Jack Kerouac’s, On the Road, and Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 the characters act in a deviant manner outside of social norms. This in turn leads to a deviant sub-cultural group which competes with the institutionalized authorities for power. Deviance in both novels is usually defined as a certain type of behaviour, such as an inebriated professor babbling on in a lecture hall filled with students or a group of teenagers frolicking naked in a city park on a hot and sunny afternoon. However, deviance can also encompass both ideas and attributes (Sagarin, 1975). The primary understanding of deviance rests in the reactions of observers, something becomes deviant because an individual, group or society takes offense and reacts negatively (Cohen, 1966, Lofland, 1969). These negative reactions occur because onlookers interpret what they see and hear as being bad, insane, strange, immoral, non-conforming, or wrong. Negative responses do more than define deviance; they serve as mechanisms of social control and power. In examining these novels from a sociological perspective, both Kerouac and Pynchon examine conflicts between mainstream society and sub-cultural groups. The deviant behaviour, thoughts, and attributes observed from the characters within the novels provide a strong argument for Austin Turk’s conflict theory of deviance, which examines power and cultural conflict as a basis for deviant behaviour.

To begin, Austin Turk’s conflict theory of crime divides society into two groups: those with power “the authorities” and those without power “the subjects”. In Pynchon’s novel The Crying Of Lot 49, this is realized by contrasting Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul to those of low social economic class…

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…sh-Catholic background, and his resemblance to a Fitzgerald hero, with a tragic death and foul dust floating in the wake of his dreams (153).

However, both of the novels express those subjects living by values beyond the social norms as having some power to change societal norms. By examining Turk’s theory of conflict between authorities and subjects, it becomes apparent the deviant behaviour observed from the characters in both novels is an influencing method of power to alter cultural and societal norms.

WORKS CITED

Dugdale, John. Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power. New York: St.Martin, 1990

Gomme, Ian McDermid. The Shadow Line: Deviance and Crime in Canada. Toronto: HBJ 1993.

Kerouac, Jack. On The Road. New York: Penguin books, 1955

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying Of Lot 49. New York: Harper

Thos Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: No Escape

There are two levels of participation within The Crying of Lot 49: that of the characters, such as Oedipa Maas, whose world is limited to the text, and that of the reader, who looks at the world from outside it but who is also affected the world created by the text.3 Both the reader and the characters have the same problems observing the chaos around them. The protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Mass, like the reader, is forced to either involve herself in the deciphering of clues or not participate at all.4

The philosophy behind The Crying of Lot 49 seems to lie in the synthesis of philosophers and modern physicists. Ludwig Wittgenstein viewed the world as a “totality of facts, not of things.”1 This idea can be combined with a physicist’s view of the world as a closed system that tends towards chaos. Pynchon asserts that the measure of the world is its entropy.2 He extends this metaphor to his fictional world. He envelops the reader, through various means, within the system of The Crying of Lot 49.

Pynchon designed The Crying of Lot 49 so that there would be two levels of observation: that of the characters such as our own Oedipa Maas, whose world is limited to the text, and that of the reader, who looks at the world from outside it but who is also affected by his relationship to that world.3 Both the reader and the characters have the same problems observing the chaos around them. The protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Mass, like Pynchon’s audience, is forced to either involve herself in the deciphering of clues or not participate at all.4

Oedipa’s purpose, besides executing a will, is finding meaning in a life dominated by assaults on people’s perceptions through drug…

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…rying of Lot 49,” Mindful Pleasures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 3.

5 John Johnston. “Paranoia as a Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49,”New Essays on the Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.

6 “Paranoia”, p. 4.

7 The Grim Phoenix, p. 15.

8 Crying of Lot 49, p. 49.

9 Robert Hipkiss, The American Absurd, (University of Chicago: New York), p. 90 10 Paranoia as a Semiotic Regime, p. 6.

11 Crying of Lot 49, p. 58.

12 Crying of Lot 49, p. 22

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13 The Grim Phoenix, p. 26

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14 Paranoia as a Semiotic Regime, p. 1

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15 Crying of Lot 49, p. 69.

16 Crying of Lot 49, p. 79

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17 David Seed, Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (University of Iowa Press: Iowa City), p. 124.