Ifonawintersnightthecryingoflot49

Today as I entered Earls Court Tube Station District Line Platforms from the Picadilly Line from Heathrow Airport, I noticed a young man with a book under his arm. Two books actually. The novelization of the Dark Night, and Italo Calvino’s If On A Winters Night a Traveller. This seemed an odd pariring, surely, especially at first sight. One could dictate that the chap carrying the books, a university age male, actually wanted to purchase The Dark Night novel for pleasure and perhaps had to purchase the Calvino book for school reading. This young man can be viewed as that which this short essay will concern itself: the role of the reader in Calvino’s book, and the role of the reader and the importance of the writer in said book and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.

This short paper will be examining the links between Italo Calvino’s If On A Winters Night A Traveler (from here on referred to as IWN) and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (from here on referred to as TCL49). I will first state what in my humble opinion are the brief similarities between the two novels: both are quest novels, but both are anti quest novels simultaneously in the fact that both novels offer hardly any sort of resolution. For Oedipa Maas in TCL49, she (nor us, the reader) is unable to resolve her predicament, in the face of so many “clues” which she has taken as serious and concrete signs of the existence of the Trystero (believed to be a historical fact) and WASTE systems as they are (or aren’t) related to the death and estate of Pierce Inverarity. In Calvino’s IWN, the Reader is on a quest to find the remainder of a novel, If On A Winters Night A Traveler, which he has purchased at a bookstore only to find that only the first chapter of the book has been printed and the rest of the book misprinted. This narrative has a;ready been frmaed by another narrative in which we as readers have already been addressed.
The subsequent chapters of the book on which the Reader embarks on his...