This is a published paper. Please click on the hyperlinked title above to view the paper. Abstract provided below. Originally, this paper was a senior honors thesis, which can be found here.
This paper explores the role of LSD in The Crying of Lot 49 specifically through the context of the 1960’s American counterculture movement. In Lot 49, the protagonist Oedipa’s husband, Mucho, ingests LSD prescribed to him by her psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarius. LSD transforms Mucho into an empty husk of a human being who cannot connect with others because LSD increases thermodynamic, informatic, and psychological entropy in the novel. Pynchon represents his negative sentiments on LSD and its countercultural proponents such as Timothy Leary in LSD’s entropic qualities, which illustrate that Pynchon, in the 1960’s, viewed LSD not as a means to achieve enlightenment, but rather as a harrowing consequence of an increasingly lonesome and meaningless modern American world that people desperately feel the need to escape.