Thomas Pynchon’s Narratives: Subjectivity and Problems of Knowing

In his first three novels, Thomas Pynchon focuses in part on the inability to achieve reliable knowledge of the self and the world. As a consequence of this and of the events around which Pynchon builds these early novels, V., The Crying of Lot 49 , and Gravity’s Rainbow tend to be read as nihilistic. This book focuses on Pynchon’s use of ideas of western history, philosophy, and science to arrive at a reading that suggests that Pynchon’s project in these early novels is to provoke his readers into taking precisely the sort of personal and political action his characters cannot.