The Crying of Lot 49 Characters

Desperate HousewifeOedipa ain't just about making apple pies and wearing frilly aprons—but people at the time of The Crying of Lot 49's publication were kind of shocked that a housewife was at th...

Mystery ManThis guy doesn't actually show up in the novel—he's dead before the action starts—but without him this novel would just be about a housewife in the Bay Area married to a DJ. Pierce I...

Wendell ("Mucho") Maas is Oedipa's husband… and he's not much of one at that. He used to work as a used car salesman, but was disgusted with his work and constantly complained about it to Oedipa....

Metzger is the dashing and super-hot co-executor of Pierce Inverarity's estate, a lawyer who works at Warpe, Wistfull, Kutitschek and McMingus. Oedipa first meets Metzger at a hotel called Echo Cou...

Dr. Hilarius is Oedipa's psychotherapist. He tries to recruit her for an experiment on the effects of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs, which she refuses (good call, Oedipa). We also learn that H...

The Paranoids are a rock band in San Narciso that Pynchon uses to mock 1960s hippie culture in general, and "Beatle-mania" in particular. When Oedipa first meets the lead singer, Miles, he tells he...

Mike Fallopian (these names do not quit) is the president of the right-wing libertarian group the Peter Pinguid Society, which makes the John Birch Society look "left-leaning" (3.24). Oedipa and Me...

Genghis Cohen is the most renowned philatelist (stamp expert) in Los Angeles. Someone has to be, right? Metzger hires him to inventory and appraise Inverarity's stamp collection. Cohen first contac...

Koteks is an engineer at the Yoyodyne Corporation, whom Oedipa meets when she gets lost during a tour at the plant. When she approaches she finds him sketching a muted post horn on the back of an e...

John Nefastis is a mad scientist at Berkeley who claims to have built a perpetual motion machine by implementing Maxwell's Demon. Oedipa learns of Nefastis from Stanley Koteks, an engineer at the Y...

Driblette is the director of The Courier's Tragedy and an expert on the play. He also stars as Gennaro, the character that ultimately gets revenge against the usurping Duke Angelo of Squagmalia. Af...

Emory Bortz is a professor who used to work at Cal but now works at San Narciso College. Oedipa wants to meet him because he edited the 1957 textbook from which Jacobean Revenge Plays (the edition...

While wandering in San Francisco, Oedipa gets swept into a gay bar called The Greek Way where she meets a man with acne and large ears. He is wearing a pin on his lapel, and on it is the symbol of...

Jesús Arrabal is a Mexican anarchist that Oedipa and Pierce met on their trip to Mazatlán. He was affiliated with a group known as Conjuración de los Insurgentes Anarquistas (CIA—hardy har har...

Like Metzger, Manny Di Presso is both a lawyer and an actor. Metzger tells Oedipa that Di Presso was hired to play him in a television pilot, but we later find out that the pilot was not a success...

Mr. Thoth is a 91-year-old resident at Vesperhaven Nursery Home, which Inverarity owned and which is located outside of San Narciso. Oedipa meets Thoth there by total chance. He has just woken up f...

Tremaine works in a government surplus store located in the same lot as Zapf's Used Book Store. After Oedipa learns that Zapf's has burned down, she wanders into Tremaine's store. He tells her that...

Clayton Chiclitz is the president of Yoyodyne, the electronics and missile company that possibly has a connection to the Tristero Conspiracy. (Pynchon first introduced Yoyodyne in his novel V.) Oed...