Shortly before the morning rush hour, he stepped off a jitney whose old driver ran a red light every day, downtown on Howard Street, and began walking toward the Embarcadero. She knew she looked terrible: knuckles black from the eyeliner and mascara she'd rubbed on, her mouth tasting like old alcohol and coffee. Through an open door, on the staircase leading into the disinfectant-smelling twilight of a boarding house, he saw an old man huddled, trembling with a pain he couldn't feel. Both hands, smoky white, covered his face. On the back of his left hand he could make out the post horn, tattooed with old ink that was now beginning to blur and expand. Fascinated, she stepped out into the shadows and climbed the creaking steps, hesitating on each one. When she was three steps away from him the hands opened and her destroyed face, and the terror of the glorified eyes in the burst veins, stopped her. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "Can I Help You?" She was shaking, she was tired. “My wife is in Fresno,” he said. He was wearing an old double-breasted suit, frayed gray shirt, wide tie, no hat. "I left her. A long time ago, I don't remember. Now this is for her." He gave Oedipa a letter that it seemed he had been carrying with him for years. "Put it there," and he held up the tattoo and looked her in the eyes, "you know. I can't go out there. It's too far away now, I had a bad night." "I know," she said. . "But I'm new in town. I don't know where it is." "Under the highway." He motioned for her to continue in the direction she was going. "Always one. You'll see." Eyes closed. Having emerged every night from that safe furrow, the bulk of the awakening of this city virtuously began plowing again at dawn, what rich lands had it transformed, what concentric planets had it discovered? Those voices heard, flashes of luminescent gods glimpsed through the stained foliage of the wallpaper, candle butts lit to rotate in the air above him, prefiguring the cigarette that he or a friend would one day fall asleep smoking, to end up like this between the secret, flaming salts that held all those years from the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could retain the vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, wet dream consumed brutally and tearfully, like a computer's memory bank of the lost ? She was suddenly overcome with the need to touch him, as if she couldn't believe in him, or wouldn't remember him, without it. Exhausted, almost knowing what she was doing, she walked the last three steps and sat down, took the man in her arms, actually held him, looking with dirty eyes down the stairs into the morning. She felt the wetness against her breast and saw that she was crying again. He was barely breathing, but tears were coming out of him as if they were being pumped. "I can't help you," she whispered, rocking him, "I can't help you." There were already too many miles to Fresno. "Is that him?" a voice asked behind her, up the stairs. "The sailor?" "He has a tattoo on his hand." "You can bring him up, okay? It's him." He turned and saw an even older, shorter man wearing a tall Hamburg hat and smiling at them. “I would help you but I have a bit of arthritis.” "Does he have to come up?" he said. "Up there?" "Where else, ma'am?" She didn't know. She let him go for a moment, reluctantly as if he were her son, and he looked at her. "Let's go," he said. He held out his tattooed hand and she took it, and so they walked the rest of the way up, and then the other two: hand in hand, very slowly for the man with arthritis. "He disappeared last night," he told her. "He said he was going to look for his old lady. It's something he does, from time to time." They entered a labyrinth of rooms and corridors,illuminated by 10 watt bulbs, separated by cardboard partitions. The old man followed them stiffly. Finally he said, “There.” In the small room there was another dress, a couple of religious treatises, a carpet, a chair. Image of a saint turning well water into oil for Jerusalem's Passover lamps. Another light bulb, dead. The bed. The mattress, waiting. Then he explored a scene he could act out. He could find the owner of that place, take him to court, and buy the sailor a new suit in Roos/Atkins, shirt and shoes, and give him the bus ticket to Fresno after all. But with a sigh he let go of her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn't heard her go, as if she had known when was the best time to let her go. “Just send the letter,” he said. , "there's a stamp on it." He looked and saw the familiar carmine 8? airmail, with a jet flying over the Capitol dome. But at the top of the dome stood a tiny figure dressed in jet black, arms outstretched. Oedipa wasn't sure what exactly was supposed to be at the top of the Capitol, but she knew it was nothing like that... [crosstalk] "He's going to die," she said. "Who isn't?" remembered John Nefastis, talking about his Machine and the massive destruction of information. So, when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking funeral: the stored and codified years of uselessness, of premature death, of self-torn, the sure decay of hope, the sum of all the men who had slept on it , whatever their life had been, would indeed cease to exist, forever, when the mattress was burned. She looked at him in amazement. It was as if he had just discovered the irreversible process. It amazed her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucinations belonging to the sailor of whom the world would no longer leave a trace. She knew, because she had held him, that he was suffering from DT. Behind the initials there was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unraveling of the plowshare of the mind. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lack of memory is the breath of God, the true paranoiac for whom everything is organized into joyful or menacing spheres around the central heartbeat of himself, the dreamer whose games of words probe ancient pits and fetid tunnels. of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is, the word is there, acting as a buffer, to protect us. The act of metaphor therefore was an attack on truth and falsehood, depending on where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was. For the reader, deciphering the difference between Oedipa's subconscious and the real voice of the narrator in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 may portend a difficult task. Often, the prose surrounding Oedipa's dialogue and internal monologue seems to transcend the simple understanding of a woman towards a sense of omnipotence - the narrator, from her extreme grasp. of detail in his high-sounding descriptions of existential situations, dreamlike behaviors, or otherworldly circumstances, he demonstrates a particular understanding of the human experience that goes far beyond a single Pynchon character. In this particular scene of old age and despair, the narrator, rather than bringing a series of banal details of the character in question, creates his own conception of life and death in the form of description. As he follows Oedipa's observations, the narrator takes his character beyond the sphere of simple human interpretation to elevated fulfillment. of experience. Oedipa, not at all, is devoid of action as she approaches the elderly drunken sailor. She feels emotionally and physically torn apartsick as she staggers down the street, searching for the clue to the underground postal system, and finally comes across the man with the "postal horn, tattooed with old ink that now begins to blur and spread." The opening paragraph of this scene seems to be full of physical details and descriptions. The reader does not gain much from either the narrator or the character of Oedipa beyond her obvious desperation and weariness. Pynchon sets the scene for the reader by basing the description in the realm of mundane and sordid reality. As the scene progresses, the narrator's personality emerges; however, at the moment of the meeting, the narrator clarifies the plot by offering the reader brief information regarding smell, sensation, taste, color and movement. The reader would immediately trust a narrator so rich in detail; his observations seem insightful and incredibly touching. For the reader, the description of "hands white as smoke", a mouth "tasting of old alcohol and coffee", the "disinfectant-smelling twilight of a boarding house" and "the terror of his eyes glorious with burst veins" resonates with an intrinsic truth. With the gory and realistic details of life at its dirtiest and saddest, the reader can't help but trust the narrator. In this opening paragraph, the scene maintains an incredible sense of truth and life: no reader can argue with the realism of the details or the narrator's motivations in describing the most basic sights, tastes, and sounds. As the reader watched Oedipa climb the creaking stairs, Slowly approaching the drunken old man, the narrator has already influenced the reader to a point of extreme trust. The reader observes and understands the same emotions and visions to which Oedipa is subjected. The reader can see her knuckles smeared with makeup; who could dispute the legitimacy of a narrator who so thoroughly and accurately develops the character's independent physical and emotional details? Furthermore, the narrator uses a hook in the plot to draw the reader into Oedipa's observations at an even more extreme pace. When he sees the post horn on the man's hand "trembling with pain that he could not feel," the narrator's reliability becomes sharper because of his fortunate sighting of a clue. This paragraph does not attempt to deceive the reader with a narrative style; rather, it attempts to draw the reader into a depth of reliable detail that will evolve into a point of heightened and expert storytelling as the scene moves to a more personal and philosophical level. At this point the reader does not get the impression of a strong-willed narrator; the written word simply seems to have an implicit honesty of detail that influences the reader in a positive way to better understand the human interaction that follows. The climactic image of the drunken man's hands suddenly opening in front of his face draws the reader into the narrator's acceleration of the plot. However, Pynchon's existential narrative style did not rear its head; the reader still has the impression of the simplicity of the theme surrounded by a detailed style. The constant reminders of the physical situation are textual markers that allow the reader to establish an intimacy with the narrator that arises from observational trust rather than philosophical agreement. However, after drawing the reader into the scene with details of the surroundings, he begins to describe the same drunken sailor, a man in "an old double-breasted suit, frayed gray shirt, loose tie, no hat." As soon as the man begins his dialogue, the reader suddenly receives a hint of mystery: the character Oedipa approaches on the stairs has an unexplained history. His wife is in Fresno; he needs a lettersent through the only method that Oedipa is trying to decipher: while looking into her eyes, the man asks Oedipa to "drop it" and points to her tattoo with the omnipresent horn symbol. Through these simple interactions, devoid of many details beyond dialogue referring to a woman from the past with whom the reader has no prior experience, the narrator draws the reader past the details into some sort of mystery, another clue in the foggy plot , which is about to be discovered. resolved both by Oedipa and by the readers themselves. Pynchon's ability to bring the reader into the text through the reliable method of realistic description takes the perfect opportunity for the narrator to address some more complicated themes resulting from the unique interaction between Oedipa and the sailor. The narrator's tone shifts to a more expert tone. after Oedipa tricks the sailor into telling her where the underground letter delivery box awaits. AfterIf the textual cue of "eyes closed" occurs, suddenly the narrator acquires a new sense of omnipotence that was missing at the beginning of the scene. The reader no longer focuses on the complexity of the details of a physical reality; with his eyes closed, Pynchon marks the transition to the dream state: the relationship between the narrator and the character becomes less important. Here, the narrator takes on the role of taskmaster – a force that Oedipa may or may not understand, as her character is almost subverted by this expansive narrator, saturated with concepts and ideas relating to life and desire. "Extracting every night from that safe furrow the mass of this city that woke up every dawn and virtuously started plowing again, what rich soil had it transformed, what concentric planets had it discovered?", seems to be a sentence fuller of meaning than Oedipa could grasp in a man's observation. With his eyes closed, the narrator assumes his own agency: he has the power and ability to dissect this man's very soul as he lies on the steps, his eyes closed in pain and sadness. A certain amount of wonder and hope surrounds the narrator's statement; Although the sailor connotes a sad state, the narrator asks larger questions about his worth to the point that he retains the ability to discover concentric planets. Clearly, Oedipa could not have speculated so thoroughly if she had simply observed the sailor in a bad state of mind. The narrator, therefore, assumes a kind of unstated power of observation that he indirectly attributes to Oedipa, or that he holds himself to be a nameless force in the narrative. The dreamlike state of mind that Pynchon so gloriously describes in this paragraph does not necessarily imply Oedipa's own conception of the situation. As the narrator describes the strange transition from reality to surrealism, "slivers of luminescent deities glimpsed through the wallpaper's stained foliage, candelabras lit to spin in the air above him," the reader understands that Oedipa cannot possibly see dreams of the sailor unless he is creating all images of light by his own conception. Pynchon skillfully connects Oedipa's subconscious being with the omnipotent aspect of the narrator, so the reader maintains a sense of trust with both the character and her narrator. Intimate with his characters, the narrator seems to overwhelm them here, drawing a picture of gods on the wallpaper, with candles dangling freely above the man's head as he dreams. The reader can observe a dramatic shift from the mundane details of life to the outrageous events of a dream - a dream that almost coincides with reality, thanks to its narration and association with the "real" character of Oedipa. Also, Oedipa.