Things Change.

Most of the books and movies we are familiar with have a similar plot. There’s a beginning, middle, and an end. In the beginning we are introduced to the characters and what the story line is going to be about. Then comes the climax when usually the bad thing or problem happens, the turning point and the problem are resolved.

The Crying of Lot 49 stared out like this. We are introduced to Oedipa Mass the main character of the story. She receives a letter leaving her in charge of her former boyfriends’ will. The middle of the book is everything Oedipa has to do to figure out the will. The mystery we encounter about the mailing company W.A.S.T.E, the clues she figures out and how she figures it out. Since I have not finished the book I don’t know how everything will turn out. Having read the second last chapter I expected that things would start to get organized, but this book continued to surprise me. Instead of getting better things got worse for her, Oedipa becomes a different person from the one we see at the beginning of the novel. “Where was the Oedipa who’d driven so bravely up here from San Narciso? The Optimistic baby had come on so like the private eye in any long-ago radio drama, believing all you needed was a grit, resourcefulness, exemption from hidebound cops’ rules, to solve any great mystery”(100). Her psychiatrist Dr. Hilaruis has gone crazy, locked himself in his office. She realizes that Mucho is addicted to LSD. Oedipa is becoming isolated from the people.

“And had gently conned herself into curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair.”(10). Remember how I said that maybe Oedipa wanted to be rescued from something? She feels like Rapunzel because she is trapped in her life and does not know how to escape. Every time worst things happen to her, instead of getting close to solving the mystery something happens that make her feels lost again, even more. Oedipa needs to be rescued from her own life.

Who knows, maybe in the last chapter things will get better for her. She may be rescued or her life may stay the same and she will become the Rapunzel that no prince wanted to rescue.