Lot 49

Well to start off the time period the book was written was around the same time of the vietnam war. As to the rhetoric aspect of the course the tet was hard to understand, even for me pick out any forms of rhetoric. I believe the characters had more of impact than the overall story. The paranoids, who were introduced in the story when Oedipa went to San Narciso, reminded me of Woodstock Festival back in 1969 when all the hippies gathered together to show that peace still existed and problems could be resolved. Other than there drug usage which in this era, was getting higher and higher, it played a key role of how the chareacters reacted towards it, for example Metzger. Pynchon writing style throughout the whole book was totally confusing, cause he kept shifting from Oedipa's past, her present, and I believe her hallucinations. This falls back to "Rhetoric-What it i, Why needed?" when a writer must be "reasonably clear and straight foward with his witing, but Pynchon definetly does not follow this priniciple because he loops around the same subject for a while until he makes his point. As to history I was only able to relate it to woodstock festival cause that was what stood out for me whe Oedipa met hippie band. When Oedipa's psychologist went haywired I really did not understand how that fed the climax, cause in all do respect Oedipa never needed him, he was in need the whole time. The over all ending was just a big circle for me, because she never really discovered anything, only to find out that she was taken for a ride with no meaning. Oedipa was lonely to begin with, and byt the end she really did not change what so ever.
I did not find myself any where similar to Oedipa or to her situation just cause it was just her trying to find out about herself but in the end she just finds out who she was at the begining. As a reader I can understand as to why she would live life of loneliness yet alone have an affair on her husband. She is lonenly, a desperate housewife who was seeking meaning her life. My strategy that I tried was just imagining myself in her shoes, in a relationship that has no fire, in a world that was filled of corruption and chaos, and just trying to figure out if I would had followed the same path she had.