The Crying Of Lot 49 By Thomas Pynchon - 1174 Words

Human nature will not succumb to the constraints of order, corporations, and institutions, rather return to the primal system of chaos and anarchy. Throughout history, the desire to rebel against order transcends because of our inherent disposition to rise up against authority, apparent in revolutions against an oppressive regime or in protest of immoral actions. Some prominent cases were the American Revolution, French Revolution, Transcendentalists’ civil disobedience, 1960’s counterculture movement, and the Civil Rights movement. Thomas Pynchon’s postmodernist novella, The Crying of Lot 49, set in the 1960 s counterculture era of hippies (rejecting mainstream American Society), captures the essence of rebelling against institutions.†¦show more content†¦Society responds through counterculture movements to return to disorder because people are â€Å"unwilling to accept the limitations by the virtues placed on them being human, they chose to rebel agai nst their position within the order of things. Latent within human nature is an unwillingness to accept this order, and our place within it† (McGrath 135). Joaquà ­n de Tristero y Calavera, the founder of Trystero, an underground network of anarchist mail carriers, exemplifies this ideal. Calavera, an â€Å"honest rebel†, came to Brussels and attempted to overthrow the Thurn and Taxis postal system, a governmental monopoly on mail. (Pynchon 131). However, he failed and retaliated with a guerilla war, â€Å"a sub rosa campaign of obstruction, terror, and depredation†, bringing chaos to the destruction of an institution (Pynchon 132) . Trystero, an intricate web of secrets, conspiracy, and chaos, functions as the driving force of entropy bringing true order to a generic life dominated by corporations and institutions (rejecting the order and transparency of governments). Disorder is order and surrounds us as everything ends in disarray. The idea of entropy entai ls that everything in the universe flows from order to disorder, and entropy is the measurement of that change. The Maxwell Demon, a tiny box that can sort fast and slow moving molecules (based on temperature), doesn’t require any work to sort molecules, and so