Description, Historical Reference, and Allegories of America in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice
Keywords:
narratology, American literature, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, Pynchon, Thomas, Inherent Vice, narrative technique, description, allegory, noirAbstract
Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, the concluding novel in his California trilogy exhibits a curious allegorical structure of California and, by extension, America, by way of descriptions of historical reference. This paper argues that these descriptions constitute a system that reflects the contemporary moral and political anxieties of post-postmodern fiction in the immediate context of the novel’s publication. What is more, the text employs Pynchon’s “stylistic, residual postmodernism” in order to put forth a powerful cautionary tale when relying on and reconfiguring the generic codes of noir.References
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