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There are two levels of apprehension to The Crying of Lot 49: that of the characters in the book, whose perception is limited to the text, and that of the reader, who has the ability to look at the world from outside of it. A recurring theme i ....

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... in what she suspects to be a conspiracy. Her role is comparable to the role of Maxwell¡¦s Demon. ¡§As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where¡¨ (p.105). Oedipa¡¦s purpose in the novel, besides executing a will, is to find meaning in a life dominated by assaults on people¡¦s perceptions through the use of drugs and the muting of communications. Entangled in this chaos, Oedipa has to do what the Maxwell¡¦s Demon does: sort useful facts from useless ones. Pynchon involves his audience i ...