23 pages • 46 minutes read
Thomas PynchonEntropy
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Signifying Names
Pynchon relies heavily on names and naming, as a quick way of evoking characters. Both Aubade and Callisto, for instance, are single names, which suggests two characters who—although a couple—are also alone in the world, without forbears or spouses. At the same time, their names are evocative of Europe and the past—Aubade’s name is French, and Callisto’s Italian—and suggest that they are cut off from these pasts, without quite having found a place for themselves in the present.
Meatball Mulligan, conversely, has a first and a last name, but he also has no history. He is presented in the story as a creature of the moment, with no preoccupations other than the immediate one of his party. His name, while a full name, also has a flippant, jokey sound, suggesting the name of a cartoon character or celebrity. All three of these characters’ names evoke a certain solitude and rootlessness of exiled Europeans as well as of ahistorical Americans.
High and Low Cultural References
Another way in which Pynchon evokes character is through frequent cultural references. These references are both high and low, encompassing classical and experimental jazz music, old Europe, and contemporary hipster America. While Callisto is the main repository of high culture in the story—brooding over names like Stravinsky, Henry Adams, and Djuna Barnes—Meatball and his guests are not uncultured themselves. While they talk in a slangy American way, their references to “Don Giovannism” (86) and to “Pavlov’s dog” (87) identify them as educated, European-identifying Americans.
Along with evoking character, these mixed references also set the mood for the story itself. The jumble of high and low references creates a mood that is both somber and jokey, encompassing talk of war and destruction—“Europeans wandering around North Africa […] with their tongues torn out of their heads” (90)—along with talk of old jazz musicians and Scientific American. The effect is destabilizing, but in a fun and lively way.
Close Omniscient Point of View
This story’s point of view is omniscient, but limited mainly to the perspectives of Meatball and Callisto, with occasional side glimpses into the mind of Aubade, Callisto’s girlfriend. Since Aubade’s perspective is a dark, confused, and lonely one—to the point where it can barely be called a perspective at all—these glimpses serve as an ominous foreshadowing, hinting at the story’s violent final paragraph.
The perspectives of Meatball and Callisto shift back and forth from one paragraph to the next, with little introduction or set-up. Rather than being told that we are now in one or another of their apartments, we are simply dropped down into their apartments and minds. This disorienting and claustrophobic effect echoes the confusion and isolation of the characters themselves. One paragraph in the story, for instance, describes three “coeds from George Washington” (86) who have just crashed Meatball’s party, to the delight of Sandor Rojas, a womanizing guest. The following paragraph begins, “Aubade’s neck made a golden bow as she bent over the sheets of foolscap” (87). This is the story’s only signal that we are now in Callisto’s apartment, upstairs from Meatball’s party; if there is a thematic link between these two paragraphs, it is that of vulnerable women out of their elements. In such quick associative leaps from one scene and consciousness to the next, the story borrows from the conventions of movies, as much as from those of literature.
Related Titles
By Thomas Pynchon
