A Comparison of Lot 49 Crying and White Noise Pynchon's novel Lot 49 Crying has a lot in common with Don DeLillo's book White Noise. The two novels strangely share certain character types, parts of the plot structure, and themes. The similarities between these two works clearly indicate a cultural conception shared by two influential and respected contemporary authors. Character similarities in the two novels are found both in the main characters and in some who are tangent to the plots. The works' two protagonists, Lot 49's Oedipa Maas and White Noise's Jack Gladney, are characters who struggle to make sense of their world, and yet both are afraid to face the pure, filtered truth. Oedipa is inadvertently sent on a quest, which she sees as a possible mechanism for giving new meaning to the world of Tupperware parties. During her journey, Oedipa is inundated with new and confusing information that is either a series of clues to a counterculture or Pierce Inverarity's attempt to expand beyond her death. This dichotomy sets up the theme of binary opposites in the novel. Oedipa's journey does not end with a final choice of one field or another, confirming one of the novel's other assertions, that excluded backgrounds are "bad shit" (J. Kerry Grant eloquently discusses Oedipa's journey in terms of binary opposites and the search for meaning in the introduction to his A Companion to "The Crying of Lot 49" (pp. xv-xvi)). Jack Gladney also involves himself and his family in a series of journeys, which are searches for safety and understanding, while sharing the mind of Oedipus. focus on finding a new reason to exist. Jack and his wife Babbette are afraid of dying. Their worries, their conversations,...... middle of paper ...... their comfort in bulk, Babette runs up the stairs of a football stadium, and both find themselves involved in the intensely neurotic conspiracy of Dylan. The concept of framing, the reduction of something to a representation that man produces and consumes, is also prevalent in these two novels. In White Noise, the most obvious examples are "The Most Photographed Barn in America" ​​(pp. 12-13) and Nature TV, and in Lot 49, it can be seen in the artificial lake, Lake Inverarity. Framing is an example of both the possibility of a meta-conspiracy and humanity's attempt to shield itself from reality. The mass-produced and easily consumable objects and ideas that appear in both novels are presented as being the possible result of a conspiracy to homogenize and control people, or an attempt by people to distance themselves from the real world and the truth..