Crying of Lot 49

After reading the first chapter of Lot 49, I found the book difficult to comprehend initially. As someone pointed out before, the very first sentence is a run-on that is seven lines long. With this being just the first sentence in the book let me know that this was going to be a hard book to get through. For starters, the protagonist of the book Oedipa, seems a bit psychotic or just a little crazy to me. But with a name like that, you can’t really blame her. She does not seem able to focus much on anything as she seems to get sidetracked easily. But despite being very difficult to get through, I noticed how Pynchon seemed to be putting an emphasis on language throughout the first chapter. I thought that Pynchon purposely throws in some satirical puns into the novel either be a representation of something or as I would wish to believe, to make things more interesting for the reader. The most obvious pun in the novel is of course Oedipa’s husband Mucho Maas, or as those with some recollection of their high school Spanish class would call him, Much More. It would seem that he got this name because of him being associated with excessiveness, such as believing in his car lot “too much.” The other names that I found to be humorous were Dr. Hilarius and Roseman. These too were obvious puns that made me believe that Pynchon is using satire to either downplay the whole idea of a connection between names and personality in literature or to focus on it.