Tracing Paranoia and Black Humor in Thomas Pynchon���s Major Narratives

Thomas Pynchon’s major narratives V. The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow incorporate various themes and historical figures and incidents as well as formal techniques. His major works have always been viewed as highly challenging texts both in terms of form and content. Among other issues paranoia and black humor are undeniably central concerns of Pynchon’s major narratives. The present research tries to study Pynchon’s illustration of paranoid obsessions in his major narratives and to examine the ways paranoia provides Pynchon with a proper tool to attack the decadence and sterility of modern Western world through his dark humor. It investigates different aspects of paranoia in Pynchon’s major narratives and explains how it presents an absurd defense mechanism against the fragmentation of postmodern condition. In the course of the study it is revealed that Pynchon’s characters resort to paranoia as the only possible means to reach a transcendence and that the characters’ futile attempt to restore order through paranoia is the central theme of Pynchon’s black humor.