A recurring theme found in Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 is the view that chaos has a profound effect on society. Pynchon engages in a dualistic method of literary technique to bring awareness to the effect that chaos has on the world. Just as the character Oedipa must read a series of confusing clues to decipher reality, so too must the reader unravel seemingly impenetrable mysteries to arrive at the meaning of the novel. In essence, then, to fully understand the meaning of Pynchon's novel, a reader must do exactly what Pierce Inverarity advises Oedipa to do; namely continuing to juggle the massive reception of information in order to avoid entropy while deciphering meaningful clues from those who do not have any. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essay Pynchon's protagonist, Oedipa Mass, spends the novel searching for clues or debating whether she should get involved in the mysteries that surround it. her. As co-executor of Pierce's estate, Oedipa embarks on an odyssey through various California cities to uncover all the repercussions involved in Inverarity's inheritance. The novel returns to the idea of ​​Newtonian forces such as action and reaction through the idea that Inverarity still manages to be a driving force despite being in a state of total entropy due to the unfortunate outcome to be a corpse. Oedipa's exploration of truth, however, is not simply physical, as it might be in a simple detective or detective novel, but it is also metaphysical. Oedipa's logic in the novel goes beyond the simple execution of another's will; she is determined to discover some kind of overwhelming meaning to a life that seems besieged by the constant attack on humanity's perceptual capacities by manipulating them with drugs or distracting them with media images. On one level, Oedipa's attempt to untangle this jumble of information is analogous to that of the Demon. The Demon is able to override the law of entropy by manufacturing a “staggering array of energies” produced by the destruction of a “massive complex of information” (84-85). For Oedipa to fulfill Pierce's advice to "keep bouncing," she must learn to do what the Demon does. Maxwell's Demon is the symbol that connects thermodynamics to the flow of information, but it can act as both a truth and a lie "depending on where you were: inside, safe, or outside." exterior, lost” (105). The lesson Oedipa learns from this machine and its experience translating hieroglyphs is that it must somehow create connections to keep it all bouncing and avoid giving in to entropy . Oedipa's quest, then, is not only to make sense of the seemingly senseless world around her, but in doing so, to arrive at an understanding of herself. The translation of these hieroglyphs acts as another metaphor in this regard. When she undertakes this act of translation, Oedipus achieves an important understanding of herself; that her obsession with finding meaning “brings something of itself” (90) to this activity. What happens to Oedipa is that she commits a fearless act that few dare attempt. Rather than mindlessly surrender to unquestioned assimilation into the system or take the path of an almost mad solipsistic insistence that everything is a design of her own consciousness, she faces the difficult choice of whether to continue Moving forward and avoiding entropy requires the effort of constantly deciphering clues and mysteries. Oedipa.