Point of view

The Crying of Lot 49 is written primarily in limited omniscient third person. This means that events are viewed objectively, yet what is viewed is confined to what the protagonist could perceive. Use of this point of view is crucial to one of the novel's objectives, since the narrative aspires to create doubt in the reader's mind as to whether the protagonist's experiences are real or delusions. Staying within the confines of one person's subjective perspective also mimics the claustrophobic isolation of someone who has retreated into paranoid delusion. In this way, the novel's point of view is appropriate for exploration of one of the novel's main themes, i.e. paranoia.

There is no explicit reference to the narrator, although a narrator's presence is hinted at by explicit instances of foreshadowing, and other literary devices. Pynchon's prose is so lush and poetic that attention is drawn to...