Part one of term paper
There are two levels of apprehension to The Crying of Lot 49: that of the characters in the book, whose perception is limited to the text, and that of the reader, who has the ability to look at the world from outside of it. A recurring theme in the novel is the phenomenon of chaos, also called entropy. Both the reader and Oedipa have the sa ...

Part two of term paper
... of the characters leads to the understanding of ourselves. Oedipa Mass, just like us, is forced to either involve herself in the deciphering of clues or not to participate at all in what she suspects to be a conspiracy. Her role is comparable to the role of Maxwell¡¦s Demon. ¡§As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where¡¨ (p.105 ...