PAPER Topics

Start of Term Paper
is as elusive as the sticky, complex webs of meaning woven into his prose. As America's most "famous" hidden author, Pynchon produces works which simultaneously deal with issues of disappearance and meaning, of identity and nothingness in a f ....

Middle of Term Paper
... novel and his shortest. Throughout the novel there are snatches of hidden agendas and mysterious plans; it is a world run by Pierce Inverarity, a character who is dead when the novel opens yet remains an active presence throughout the work. This seems to fit Pynchon's situation rather nicely as the ghostly moderator of a tired world, leading his main character Oedipa Maas on a quest for meaning while blindly groping for clues about a conspiratorial mail system known only as the Trystero. Oedipa's quest echos the quest of everyone; she wishes for an identity that makes some sense within the framework of her world. Thomas Pynchon, by erasing ...