Character Analysis
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.
After seeing the play, Oedipa goes to ask Driblette about the play's reference to Tristero. As he changes out of his Gennaro costume and showers, Driblette tries to tell her that his imagined version of the play is more important than the text itself, and that Oedipa (who he thinks is a literary scholar) should not read too much into it. He tells her, "You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth" (3.170). This turns out to be very good advice.
Later, Oedipa is troubled by the fact that Driblette seems to know things he shouldn't. For example, the book from which he claims to have taken the play doesn't actually reference Tristero, so it seems that he wrote the line in himself. The way that Driblette depicts the Tristero attack on stage also closely resembles real-life attacks Oedipa discovers, and she isn't sure if it is a coincidence.
Unfortunately, Oedipa never gets the chance to clarify any of this with Driblette, because he kills himself by walking into the Pacific Ocean, an act he hints at the first time that they met:
"If I were to dissolve in here, be washed down the drain into the Pacific, what you saw tonight would vanish too." (3.169)
Like a bunch of characters in the novel, Driblette seems to offer Oedipa good leads, but the leads vanish when Driblette kills himself, and Oedipa is left with just a "dribbling" of clues. Since Driblette thinks Oedipa is a literary scholar, it is also easy to read him as a metafictional device through which Pynchon can speak to the critics who will later approach his work… don't look too closely for meaning here, guys.