Writing Style as Stream of Consciousness in Crying of Lot 49

     The writing style in The Crying of Lot 49 at first appears to simply be strange and difficult to understand for no reason. But I think that the writing style is chosen to represent how we actually think. Maybe I am just crazy, but when I think about things I often interrupt myself if I think of something new, and the process is certainly not as refined as classical prose since I do not have an end in sight, and thus cannot filter out unnecessary details. In writing in this fashion, we are put more into the story and get to see the narrator's perspective on details by seeing how he thinks about the ongoing events in which details he chooses to include, and sometimes we can also see what he was about to say and learn something about his opinions. It makes the story more like a phantasmagoria, where we explore events through the narrator's thoughts, than a cohesive story in itself. Perhaps later in the story this technique will be further used to show decay in the ability to reason, a separation between thought and reality, or to express how different characters' do not think rationally.