Christopher Booker is a scholar who wrote that every story falls into one of seven basic plot structures: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. Shmoop explores which of these structures fits this story like Cinderella’s slipper.
Plot Type : Quest
The Call
A series of super-bizarre clues leads Oedipa to go see The Courier's Tragedy, where she first hears the word "Trystero" and imagines it might be the key to a mystery. Up until this point, Oedipa has had a passive interest in executing Inverarity's estate, but from here on out she will become increasingly obsessed with proving or disproving the existence of an 800-year-long postal conspiracy called Tristero.
The Journey
Oedipa's journey is largely a mental one. At least, we aren't sure how much of it is real and how much is imagined. She tries to take a break from the Tristero mystery in San Francisco, but instead spends a long, confused night wandering the city, seeing signs of Tristero everywhere she goes. The clues seem to pile on top of her, insisting on Tristero's existence, but they don't point to a moment of revelation. It's like a maze with no exit.
Arrival and Frustration
At the end of the night, Oedipa follows a Tristero postman, who leads her back to the mad scientist John Nefastis's apartment…which is exactly where she started. She is overwhelmed and frustrated by the whole ordeal.
Final Ordeals
After the ordeal in San Francisco, Oedipa begins reaching out to the men in her life. But she finds that her psychotherapist has lost his mind and that he was a Nazi all along. She finds her husband is taking hallucinogenic drugs given to him by her psychotherapist and has pretty much gone off the rails. She finds that her new lover abandoned her for a younger girl, and that the director of The Courier's Tragedy—the play that started her entire quest—killed himself by walking into the Pacific.
Oedipa is utterly isolated and no closer to solving the mystery of the Tristero.
The Goal
The novel ends with yet one more promise that the mystery of Tristero might be solved. A mysterious bidder for the Tristero stamp forgeries in Pierce Inverarity's collection emerges, and Oedipa's friend Genghis Cohen thinks he must be from the Tristero.
She reluctantly goes to the auction to find out who the man might be, and yet the novel ends as "The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49" (6.158). In short, the quest never resolves itself. We never learn if the Tristero is real or imagined. And we never really learn what Oedipa was questing after in the first place. Thanks for nothing, Thomas Pynchon.
Basically, the plot refuses to resolve itself. We are tricked into spending all this time following Oedipa through the maze, and there is no payoff. If you are frustrated, our only suggestion is that you go back a few pages and reread Oedipa's musing on Tristero and the nature of America. If there is a satisfying conclusion to the novel, to the symbolic meaning of Tristero (if not its real nature), it can be found there.