Oedipa Maas is the main character of Thomas Pynchon's novella The Crying of Lot 49.
Character[]
A housewife living in the Northern California city of Kinneret, most of the Crying of Lot 49 describes Oedipa's discovery/invention of a mysterious organization known as "W.A.S.T.E.". Oedipa largely does this out of a desire to experience something beyond her boring and dull life as a housewife and to avoid actually working on executing Pierce Inverarity's will.
Oedipa is described as being a Young Conservative and rubs shoulders with the (somewhat) far-right conspiracy theorist Mike Fallopian. Despite this, she has some ethical limits as she contemplates murdering the neo-Nazi owner of a surplus store.[1]
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History[]
At least one year before meeting Mucho Maas, Oedipa met Pierce Inverarity and started a brief relationship with him.[2] During this short-lived relationship, she first met a communist-anarchist revolutionary named Jesús Arrabal.[3] Oedipa ended the relationship while at an art gallery and presumably married Mucho Maas shortly after this.[2]
Some time later, Pierce Inverarity died and Oedipa was served with his will. Oedipa met with Inverarity's lawyer, Metzger. The two began a sexual relationship around this time. At the same time, Oedipa encountered the members of a band known as "the Paranoids" for the first time. The next day, Oedipa and Metzger visited a bar known as "the Scope" and met the conspiracy theorist Mike Fallopian for the first time. It was while she was at the Scope that she first encountered the muted post horn symbol of W.A.S.T.E.
After learning of a play called "The Courier's Tragedy" from one of the Paranoids, Oedipa watched a performance of it performed by Randy Driblette which included references to a "Tristero". Once the show ended, Oedipa spoke with Driblette but learned little about Tristero from this talk.
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Sources[]
| Works of Thomas Pynchon | ||
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Early works (Collected in Slow Learner) | ||