A Play within a Book
Oedipa and Metzger are described to arrive at the play The Courier's Tragedy on page 49; the play ends on page 58. That is almost 9 pages of describing this play, with a few intermittent points about how Oedipa didn't find any graffiti in the bathroom and Metzger wanted to leave early. Either way, that is an absurdly large amount of time to spend describing a play where the only thing you need to know is that after dead soldiers were thrown into a lake, their bones were excavated and one character was murdered by a trio of murderers called the Trystero. In fact, the lack of significance of this play is even emphasized by the director himself. I doubt we will see anything related to the play coming back in the future, and I just can't believe how detailed and complicated Pynchon decided to make that mess of a plot, or why that needed to even be part of the book.
It did seem kind of a ridiculous play that didn't really have to do with much of anything. However, I am of the opinion that everything in a story happens for a reason, and so I do think we'll be able to find how this ties into the rest of the story in some way. With that said, I do think Pynchon took a little to much time describing the play's events.
ReplyDeleteBy adding in a mess of evidence, the book seems to mirror real life better since we never know if something will become significant later in the story and some things will be left unexplained. Perhaps the director merely said it is not important because he is part of some large conspiracy or he is unaware of the play's actual origins and so thinks the details she notices are not important while the original author put them there intentionally.
ReplyDelete