Entropy is a short story written by Thomas Pynchon. Released in 1960 and reprinted in Pynchon's collection Slow Learner and tells of a party in a closed environment.
Characters[]
- Meatball Mulligan
- Callisto - one of the inhabitants of the hermetically-sealed room, who is obsessed with entropy
- Aubade - Callisto's lover
- Sandor Rojas - one of Meatball's friends, a Hungarian and a former freedom fighter
- Saul - a guest at Meatball's party
- Slab - one of the sailors
- Duke, Vincent, Krinkles, and Paco - the Duke di Angelis quartet
Plot[]
In February of 1957, Meatball Mulligan hosts a party in his Washington, D.C. apartment room for around forty hours with a Hungarian named Sandor Rojas and four musicians who comprise the Duke di Angelis quartet. Directly above Meatball's apartment is a hermetically-sealed room in which a paranoid man named Callisto and his lover Aubade live. Callisto is extremely paranoid about the heat death of the universe and watches a thermometer which shows that the world outside his dome has held steady at 37 degrees. While watching the thermometer, Callisto clasps a dying bird in his hand.
At the party, Meatball and his friends make drinks and are soon joined by several new guests. First to arrive is a man named Saul who scales up to the third floor to get into the party. He is closely followed by several college students and quickly begins talking with Meatball about how his wife ran out on him. Once this finishes, several rowdy Navy sailors arrive. Meatball talks about music with one of the quartet shortly before a fight breaks out after a guest headbutts one of the sailors.
In the room above, Callisto notices that the bird has died. Realizing that his fears have proven true, Callisto lets his lover smash the windows open - opening the closed state both of them lived within to the forces of entropy and allowing the temperature to equalize to 37 degrees.
See also[]
| Title | Author | Release date | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| V. | Thomas Pynchon | 1963 | A novel by the same author with similar themes |
| A Queer Night in Paris | Guy de Maupassant | ???? | A short story about a wild party |
| Works of Thomas Pynchon | ||
|
Early works (Collected in Slow Learner) | ||