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Chapter 37 - Ambiguity

from Part III - Approaches and Readings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2019

Inger H. Dalsgaard
Affiliation:
Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
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Summary

One of the most important early studies of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction is Thomas Schaub’s Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity (1981), which, more than thirty years later, is still an essential resource because ambiguity remains the single greatest obstacle for the reader of Pynchon. That is to say, ambiguity characterizes every aspect, formal and thematic, of Pynchon’s narrative project – for readers both inside and outside the storyworlds his narratives create. As Schaub points out, characters are caught between facts or actions and their possible meaning(s), as is the external reader of narratives that refuse to align literary form with meaning. These fictional worlds not only lack certainty but are constructed to suggest that an order exists but is withheld and remains unknown because it is unnamed, experienced only in suspicions. Coexisting possibilities emerge from the tension between the fragmentary experiences of characters that inhabit a diegetic world in decline, hinting at the existence of a dimension of unified, continuous meaning with the potential to offer renewal if not redemption.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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