How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by US Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. (5.102)
Does this withdrawal strike you as something that could actually happen in America? Do you think the American underground is bothered that the government (had) a monopoly on the means of communication? Where is the seed of truth in Pynchon's crazy conspiracy theory?
Quote #5
You have stumbled [...] onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of the surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know. (6.116)
What is this "exitlessness" that Oedipa sees in America? Is she simply attaching her own personal problems to a vision of the Republic? What does this sense of "the absence of the surprise to life" say about America going into the 1960s?
Quote #6
She turned, pivoting on one stacked heel, could find no mountains either. As if there could be no barriers between herself and the rest of the land. San Narciso at that moment lost (the loss pure, instant, spherical, the sound of a stainless orchestral chime held among the stars and struck lightly), gave up its residue of uniqueness for her; became a name again, was assumed back into the American continuity of crust and mantle. (6.143)
At the end of the novel, the significance of the Tristero quickly moves beyond San Narciso to America as a whole. What causes Oedipa to have this revelation so suddenly? Is it believable?