Names and Absurdity

The first thing that captures my attention while reading The Crying of Lot 49 is the name of the protagonist, Oedipa Mass. The unusual name is obviously hinting at Oedipus from Sophocles’ play, but I am not sure yet if such an allusion would tell anything about the character as well. 

Reading further into Chapter I, I am excited about more names that seem to tell stories by themselves. Pierce Inverarity sounds like “pierce in variety”. “Pierce” can mean “to see through the usually misleading or false appearance of something” according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, along with the fact that Pierce Inverarity appears in the story only in the Oedipa’s memories which leads to my conjecture that there might be a mysterious story behind him that will develop in the later chapters. Also, Oedipa’s psychiatrist is named Dr. Hilarius. There’s certainly some absurdity about him since he calls at 3 a.m. about some drug experiment and explains that he has some intuition that makes him feel that Oedipa needs him. It seems that most of the characters appearing in the novel so far more or less have some mental issues. This makes me wonder if the author really have a purpose behind all those peculiar names, or is he intentionally making a jest to highlight the explicit absurdity on the surface of the story while there can be more to dig underneath.