A Journey Into The Mind of Watts

Both a Journey into the Mind of Watts and Crying of Lot 49 began much the same: the introduction of the Oedipa in all her housewife glory and the racial tension that haunts Watts. While Crying of Lot 49 delves more into the confusion that Oedipa faces and more importantly her wish of crying to "God" and hoping that its still a dream, the people of Watts are not given such a luxury: "While the white culture is concerned with various forms of systematized folly--the economy of the area in fact depending on it--the black culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities like disease, like failure, violence and death, which the whites have mostly chosen--and can afford--to ignore."

While Pynchon's fiction deals with many complexities regarding the cultural chaos of the 1960's, the Journey into the Mind of Watts already shows the battle that has been silently raging on in this district. Oedipa fears the worst and the conspiracy behind the muted trumpet essentially seeking a solution to a possibly non-existent problem; an issue but in a dark sense a luxury she can afford to never realize. The people of Watts, however, must learn the culture and the religion to survive. "It is a ritual exchange, like the dirty dozens."

Pynchon's fictional argument is that in the end, there are some mysteries, some puzzles, that remained unsolved. People will fit whatever theory or interpretation they can to the evidence in hopes that some solution can be revealed that something or everything in the world holds purpose and renders sense. His non-fictional purpose supports along the same lines. No matter the how people believe the world has improved, there is still such improvements to be made. "In Watts, apparently, where no one can afford the luxury of illusion, there is little reason to believe that now will be any different, any better than last time." I feel that with a more direct approach the nonfiction served its purpose better, though the complexity and confusion of his fiction piece, through an overall literary sense, the fiction served to bring a deeper interpretation.