"The Crying of Lot 49" Chapter 5

This chapter was jam-packed full of events and information leading up to the purpose and meaning of the muted post horn.  The chapter begins with Oedipa going to Berkeley to try to determine the reason behind the four different versions of the play, but the professor who wrote the preface has moved to San Narciso College.  On her way back, she stops to get tested to see if she’s a “sensitive” at John Nefastis’s residence.  Once she found out that she couldn’t mentally force the Demon to sort the molecules, thus confirming that she indeed was not a “sensitive,” John Nefastis asked Oedipa to go have sex with him.  Although she ran out of his house screaming, this event represents a reoccurring representation in this novel.  Instead of sex being based on love, passion, and sensuality, this novel suggests that it is purely a way to relieve boredom.  Oedipa has an affair with Metzger only because she was bored with her own marriage and this reckless act would spice up her life a little bit.  However, Metzger was the only man she engaged in infidelity with, rejecting all the other men’s sexual advances toward her, regardless of how small.

As the novel continues, we find Oedipa being flocked into a gay bar.  During her time there, we see another image of isolation as she sits there as the only female amongst drunken homosexuals.  This image is maintained as Oedipa begins to hallucinate.  She begins to see the muted post horn or references to it on the bus, then at the Laundromat, in the bathroom at the airport, and overhears a mother tell her son to write to her using the W.A.S.T.E. postal system.  Upon leaving, she sees a garbage can with these letters on it, so she sticks around to follow the letter carrier, which ends up going to John Nefastis’s residence.  Back at her hotel, she ends up dancing near perfectly for half an hour at a deaf-mute convention to no music at all.

From there, she decides to return home, heading straight to Dr. Hilarius in hopes of being assured that this whole ordeal is simply a figment of her imagination.  Upon her arrival, she is greeted by gunshots and soon learns that Dr. Hilarius has gone crazy. Oedipa is pulled into his hide-out room, and he confesses that he worked at a concentration camp for the Jews.  She eventually seizes the opportunity to turn the gun around on him so that the police can come take him away.  Outside, she gives a live account of the encounter over her husband’s radio station.  She then discovers that he is tripping on LSD, claiming that he doesn’t have nightmares about the empty car lot when he takes it.  Oedipa heads back to San Narciso, feeling as though she no longer knows her husband.  This is the ultimate image of isolation as Oedipa is left alone with all these pieces to this massive puzzle.