There are two levels of participation in The Crying of Lot 49: that of the characters, like Oedipa Maas, whose world is limited to the text, and that of the reader, who looks at the world from the outside but who is also affected by the world created by the text.3 The reader and the characters have the same difficulties observing the chaos around them. The protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Mass, like the reader, is forced to either become involved in deciphering the clues or not participate at all.4The philosophy behind The Crying of Lot 49 seems to lie in the synthesis of the philosophers and philosophers. modern physicists. Ludwig Wittgenstein saw the world as a “totality of facts, not of things.”1 This idea can be combined with the physicist view of the world as a closed system that tends toward chaos. Pynchon says that the measure of the world is its entropy2. He extends this metaphor to his fictional world. It envelops the reader, through various means, in the system of the crying of Lot 49. Pynchon designed The Crying of Lot 49 so that there are two levels of observation: that of characters like our own Oedipa Maas, whose world is limited to the text, and to that of the reader, who looks at the world from the outside but who is also affected by his relationship to this world.3 The reader and the characters have the same difficulties in observing the chaos that surrounds them. surrounded. The protagonist of Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Mass, like Pynchon's audience, is forced to either become involved in deciphering the clues or not participate at all.4 Oedipa's goal, besides the execution of A desire is to find meaning in a life dominated by aggression. on people's perceptions through drugs... middle of paper ......rying of Lot 49, "Mindful Pleasures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 3.5 John Johnston." Paranoia as a Regime semiotics in The Crying of Lot 49, "New Essays on the Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.6 "Paranoia", p. 4.7 The Grim Phoenix, p. 15.8 Crying of Lot 49, p. 49.9 Robert Hipkiss, The American Absurd, (University of Chicago: New York), p. 90. 10 Paranoia as a semiotic regime, p. 6.11 The tears of the lot 49, p. 26.14 Paranoia as a semiotic regime, p. , p. 1.15 The tears of lot 49, p. 69.16 The tears of lot 49, p... 124.