Wilhelm continuously relives his past as soon as he gets bored of the present. The ultimate symbol of the past to Wilhelm is his dead mother. He feels she was a better parent than his father and a better wife to his father than his wife was to him. This theme is ironic as the title of the novel is "Seize the Day," an idiom for living in the present.

Existentialism is "a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will" (Oxford Dictionary). This novel embodies the existentialism movement by embracing Wilhelm's anxiety and absurdity. One example is when he is repulsed by the materialism of Mr. Rappaport yet at the same time he wants the material wealth that Rappaport has.

Alienation, alongside Existentialism make up two key factors of Bellow's writing as a Jewish-American. In Wilhelm's case, his alienation comes from not being able to succeed in the capitalistic society he lives in. This alienation is directly correlated to materialism; where money and property are the proof of a successful individual. This materialistic mindset corresponds to the characters' lifestyle, ideology, and personality which reveals Bellow's societal commentary.

The combination of Modernism and Naturalism (as defined in other branches) that allows Bellow to showcase the aesthetic self-consciousness that Modernism provides in addition to the Naturalist ideal of people being shaped by their environment. Wilhelm (an existentialist) observes his situation through a lens of anxiety and absurdity which Bellow portrays self-consciously while making a commentary on the alienating nature of capitalism/society.

The theme of the "American Dream" is discussed and debated by several characters as many have differing opinions on it. The core ideal of the American Dream is to become successful and rich. Wilhelm seems to have had a shot at this dream when he was young and pursuing his career as an actor, but as grand as the American Dream is, it is also an elusive achievement which Wilhelm fails to fully grasp as he tries his hand with the stock market after failing to be an actor.

Key:
Novels have corresponding colours:
-Seize the Day ~ Yellow
-Invisible Man ~ Green
-Lolita ~ Pink
-The Crying of Lot 49 ~ Red
-The Left Hand of Darkness ~ Blue
-Mumbo Jumbo ~ Orange
Shared themes/motifs between novels are teal
Shared movements are purple

The idea of Psychology in Seize the Day is mocked yet also utilized to illuminate characters. One of the biggest struggles in the novel is a Freudian one: the Oedipal hatred Wilhelm has for his dad. However, the character that personifies Bellow's commentary on psychology is Dr. Tamkin. Dr. Tamkin is both a character that, like the motif of psychology itself, serves as the perfect subject of parody and irony and capable of illumination of the truth. He monologues about the conflict between the true soul and the pretender soul that is burdened by the forces and demands of the outside world. Bellow does seriously address the issues of the internal world of the human being. However, because Bellow makes fun of Tamkin constantly, the field of psychology becomes a part of that problematic "external" world.

The city serves to create the background of crowds and technology in Tommy's world. It serves to illustrate his disjunction with the outside/external world, the world that surrounds him. The city is mentioned at many points throughout the novel: Tommy is constantly claiming his hatred toward it. He would much rather live in the country, as he is unaccustomed to it. However, there are moments when he finds himself at one with the crowds of the city. Therefore, this urban landscape can both serve as the dark backdrop of Tommy's life, the very symbol of what he is trying to escape, or it can be a force that allows him to feel solidarity with his fellow man.

In philosophy, naturalism is the "idea or belief that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe" (Oxford Dictionary). In this case, Bellow uses animal imagery to draw the connection between natural law in the city. Almost every chapter in the novel has an animalistic reference. Tommy calls both himself and his father an ass, a bear, and other names. Tommy was also once called "Velvel," by his grandfather. The word velvel is actually a Yiddish word meaning wolf, further drawing on Bellow's Jewish-American heritage. This motif serves to illustrate man's animalist natural tendencies and the internal instincts of a person. It also shows the struggle between naturalism and the mechanical world, a topic that is satirized in Tamkin's poem.

Literary realism is a literary movement that "represents reality by portraying mundane, everyday experiences as they are in real life" (Oxford Dictionary). In Seize the Day, Wilhelm's life is portrayed in as much gritty detail as possible, with his breakdowns and joy being depicted as naturally as possible. The course of the book follows Wilhelm as he meets people and pursues his everyday life while trying to achieve the American Dream.

Modernism refers to "a global movement in society and culture that from the early decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the experience and values of modern industrial life" (Oxford Dictionary). This novel follows the modernist tradition by depicting Wilhelm's struggle to adapt to the capitalist system he is (unwillingly) a part of.

Wilhelm's story includes not one but two deceptions. Maurice Venice tricked Wilhelm at a very young age and had him dropped out of college to go to Hollywood. Later, Wilhelm finds out that he had been a fraud all along and yet this realization doesn't prevent him from being manipulated by Dr. Tamkin into investing in bogus stocks. This deception plays into Wilhelm's naivete as well as the novel's focus on "natural law" in the city, where deception is a way for someone to achieve the American Dream no matter how unethical it may be.

Wilhelm, the protagonist of the novel embodies the accumulation of failure. He has been tricked by frauds and ungrateful people again and again in his life and that has left him absolutely helpless in the end. He failed at school; in Hollywood; in his corporate job; in his marriage; in love; in the stock market; and in the relationship with his father. Wilhelm's sheer amount of failure ties to the novels existentialism as Wilhelm struggles to remain positive following the events of his life.

Derealization is a mental state where you feel detached from your surroundings. Wilhelm's moment of derealization occurs in chapter five when Wilhelm has an interior monologue about isolation, language, and communication. He jumps from this topic into a memory of Times Square and how he felt close to humanity in the subway station. He claims to have felt a connection to some sort of "larger body." His monologue further abstracts the idea of society and the individual. Derealization was also touched on by Dr. Tamkin when he talked about the true soul vs the pretender soul.

This movement was based on the principle that pursuit of beauty and elevation of taste was the main aim of art. This can be best seen in Bellow's writing on Wilhelm's surroundings. Oftentimes using aesthetic language to soften the mental anguish that Wilhelm is feeling. Bellow use of water as a signifier of Wilhelm's feeling is Bellow's prioritization of aestheticism.

Existentialism is "a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will" (Oxford Dictionary). The narrator confronts his own authenticity, absurdity, and alienation leading to an existential crisis that leads him to dwell in a basement, hiding from society and by extension the racism that is an obstacle in finding his own identity.

The Narrator struggles with the limitations of ideology as he realizes that his ability to define his inner self is limited by people's racism as well as just their general ideologies. He finds that the ideologies promoted by institutions are too simple for something as complex and multidimensional as human identity. The novel shows this by introducing many types of ideologies that the narrator later outgrows. From the sycophantic ideology of Booker T. Washington to the separationist ideology of Ras the Exhorter. The Brotherhood also promotes an ideology that promises to save "the people" yet, in practice, it limits and betrays an individual's freedom. The novel suggests that life is too unpredictable to be defined by a singular ideology. The antithesis of ideology to the narrator is jazz, which achieves its best moments in its unpredictability and improvisation.

While the narrator tries to escape the grip of prejudice on an individual level, he encounters other blacks who attempt to prescribe a defense strategy for all African Americans. Each presents a theory of the supposed right way to be black in America and tries to outline how black people should act in accordance with this theory. However, the narrator finds that such prescriptions only counter stereotype with stereotype and replace one limiting role with another. The narrator’s grandfather explains his belief that in order to undermine and mock racism, black people should exaggerate their servitude to white people. Dr. Bledsoe, thinks that black people can best achieve success by working industriously and adopting the manners and speech of white people. Ras the Exhorter thinks that black people should rise up and take their freedom by destroying white society. Although all of these conceptions arise from within the Black community itself, the novel implies that they ultimately prove as dangerous as white people’s racist stereotypes. By seeking to define their identity within a race in too limited a way, black figures such as Bledsoe and Ras aim to empower themselves but ultimately undermine themselves.

The narrator showcases just how many obstructions society has erected to prevent African Americans from achieving real equality and the freedom to self-actualize. As an educated man with both the ambition and talent necessary to lead the charge for Black civil rights, the narrator initially believes in the promise of freedom. However, his experiences over the years quickly show him just how illusory this promise really is. Aside from the narrator, the character in the novel who best shows the illusory promise of freedom is Rinehart. Rinehart is a surreal figure who occupies several identities; including a pimp, a bookie, and a preacher. The narrator longs for Rinehart’s freedom to exist as many different people as he wishes to experience a similar freedom. But the narrator also realizes Rinehart may not even be real. And if he is real, his freedom comes at the cost of always hiding in plain sight, since his costume is also a disguise. Freedom therefore remains as elusive for Rinehart as is it does for the narrator.

Throughout the novel, the narrator repeatedly comes up against authority figures who wield power in their own self-interest. Like Dr. Bledsoe, who chooses to restore his own reputation with his white benefactors by disparaging the narrator's character to his white contacts in New York. During the narrator’s prolonged struggle with the leadership of the Brotherhood. This repeated encounter with unjust authority figures leads the narrator to develop a deep skepticism for the world around him.

The motif of blindness and invisibility go hand in hand in the novel. With blindness representing how people willfully avoid seeing/confronting the truth. This is best shown in conjunction with invisibility because the narrator becomes invisible due to the blindness of the people around him. While the novel almost always portrays blindness negatively, it's more ambiguous towards invisibility. The novel cements that invisibility can bring disempowerment, but it can also bring freedom and mobility.

The novel was written in a post-war world. WWII created several factors that serve as a backdrop to Wilhelm's isolation in the novel, showing the feelings of many during the time period. War created dissolution and dislocation because of forced immigration. During the war, many people, especially Jewish people, were escaping the Germans by fleeing their country. Alliance members were disillusioned after seeing the horrors the war brought. In opposition to the above, the war created a positive economic boom as there was also a surge in technological interest. The reasons for this surge are two-fold: America was rich and America was involved in a post-WWII cold war with the Soviet Union since the countries competed technologically. It is in this world that a man like Tommy Wilhelm is lost. Wilhelm is an idealist surrounded by the pressures of the outside world. He is isolated and therefore turns inward. The urban landscape is the symbol that furthers his isolation, for he is always "alone in a crowd." Bellow wants the reader to understand this isolation and writes almost the entire novel in Wilhelm's head. We experience the back and forth of uncertainty, the wavering of watery thoughts, the sadness and frustration of being that person that is "alone in the crowd."

Ellison sets most of the novel in Harlem during this decade which has special importance, given that it comes in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a major intellectual and artistic movement in the 1920s that witnessed a blossoming African-American culture. In addition to the production of significant works of literature, music, and visual art, the Harlem Renaissance also gave birth to a positive sense of black identity known as the "New Negro." Whereas the “Old Negro” remained hampered by the historical trauma of slavery, the “New Negro” had a renewed sense of self, purpose, and pride. However, in contrast to the optimism of 1920s Harlem, Ellison shows a troubling vision of a poor, working-class Harlem that suffers at the mercy of warring ideological factions. On one hand, there’s the Brotherhood, guided by the ideas of Marxist-Leninism. On the other hand, there’s Ras the Exhorter and his band of Black nationalists, who see all white influence as detrimental to Black life. Ellison’s vision of Harlem in the 1930s offers a stark depiction of the neighbourhood’s decline.

A bildungsroman is "a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education" (Oxford Dictionary). There are three main parts to a bildungsroman: 1) an experience that spurs the character to leave home/family, 2) a collection of challenging events that educates the main character, and then 3) the self-realization of the main character. In Invisible Man these three moments are as follows: 1) the narrator gets expelled from college and seeks a new life in New York City; 2) the narrator experiences racism and numerous betrayals; almost gets killed in an explosion; becomes a human experiment for doctors; gets involved in Harlem race riots; and more, and 3) the narrator awakens from a nightmare, stripped of his illusions. He sees his life with renewed vision and clarity, finally realizing that his experiences shape his identity; that he is a part of history; and is ready to become "visible" once again.

Ellison thematizes blues and jazz—specifically that of Louis Armstrong—into the novel to complement the narrator’s quest to define himself. Because jazz needs the improvisational talents of individual soloists and because it developed primarily among African-American musicians, it serves as a metaphor for the black struggle for individuality in American society. It also makes an appropriate soundtrack for a novel about the search for such individuality. "Armstrong, widely considered the most important soloist in the history of jazz, almost single-handedly transformed jazz—which originally evolved as collective, ensemble-based music—into a medium for individual expression in which a soloist stood out from a larger band" (Louis Armstrong House Museum). In the Prologue, the narrator listens specifically to Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue.” This track relates directly to Invisible Man on a thematic level, as it represents one of jazz’s earliest attempts to make an open commentary on the subject of racism. Fats Waller originally wrote the song for a musical comedy in which a dark-skinned black woman would sing it as a lament, ruing her lighter-skinned lover’s loss of interest in her. However, Armstrong transformed the piece into a direct commentary on the hardships faced by black people in a racist white society. Like Invisible Man, the song’s lyrics emphasize the conflict between the singer/speaker’s inner feelings and the outer identity imposed on him by society. The narrator listens to Armstrong sing that he feels “white inside” and that “my only sin / is in my skin.” By placing this song in the background of his story without offering direct commentary, Ellison provides subtle reinforcement for the novel’s central tension between white racism against black people and the black struggle for individuality.

Ellison makes use of the three types of irony (Verbal, Dramatic, and Situational) to better showcase the important themes of the novel. One of the first times verbal irony is used is at the very beginning of the novel where the narrator refers to himself as invisible yet later goes on to speak about conversations and interactions he had with people. Verbal irony is used to perplex the reader, prompting the question of psychological invisibility rather than physical invisibility. An example of dramatic irony is when Dr. Bledsoe gives him his letters of recommendation yet instructs him to not look at its contents, hinting to the reader that something is amiss. He later finds out the letters paint him as an untrustworthy and unreliable person. This interaction shows a component of why he is invisible - the authority figure of Dr. Bledsoe protects white interests while disparaging the narrator. Situational irony can be seen in the narrator's reverence of Booker T. Washington, at the beginning of the novel he pictures himself as the next Booker T. Washington this idea is then suggested later by Brother Jack. While the narrator believes this to be true The Brotherhood is indoctrinating the narrator to be their puppet. Ellison felt that Washington's beliefs played too much into white authority's hands which is exactly what happens to the narrator.

Modernism refers to "a global movement in society and culture that from the early decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the experience and values of modern industrial life" (Oxford Dictionary). This novel follows the modernist tradition by depicting the narrator's struggle to self-realize in the racist society in which he lives.

Ellison’s fundamental message in the novel is to show how the skin colour of the African American narrator makes him invisible and alienates him from the socio-economic and socio-political structures of American society. Alienation, alongside Existentialism, make up two key factors of Ellison's writing as an African American. In the narrator's case, his alienation comes from not being able to self-realize in current society. This alienation is directly correlated to ideology and racism. This inherent racist mindset of the characters the narrator encounters corresponds directly to the characters' lifestyle, ideology, and personality which reveals Ellison's societal commentary

Lolita is a morally challenging novel with a narrator that seems to be a confirmed pedophilic rapist. Rather than being direct about the didactic message in the text Nabokov instead employs literary techniques to make his message as cryptic as possible. By having a foreword preceding the novel, the reader is exposed to the knowledge of what becomes of the characters before they are actually introduced. In this foreword we also learn that Humbert Humbert is dead, further complicating the cause and effect model that people refer to when talking about morality. Nabokov also ends the novel with an afterword discussing the purpose of the book. His answers seem almost blasé as rather than commenting on any part of the events that occur in the novel he states that “It is childish to study fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author” (Nabokov, 216). This approach gives the reader total power in deciding the moral of the story as well as what to believe and what not to believe.

Throughout Lolita, the interactions between European and American cultures result in perpetual misunderstandings and conflict. Charlotte Haze, an American, is drawn to the sophistication and worldliness of Humbert, a European. She eagerly accepts Humbert not so much because of who he is, but because she is charmed by what she sees as the glamour and intellect of Humbert’s background. Humbert has no such reverence for Charlotte. He openly mocks the superficiality and transience of American culture, and he views Charlotte as nothing but a simple-minded housewife. However, he adores every one of Lolita’s vulgarities and chronicles every detail of his tour of America—he enjoys the possibilities for freedom along the open American road. He eventually admits that he has defiled the country rather than the other way around. Though Humbert and Lolita develop their own version of peace as they travel together, their union is clearly not based on understanding or acceptance. Lolita cannot comprehend the depth of Humbert’s devotion, which he overtly links to art, history, and culture, and Humbert will never truly recognize Lolita’s unwillingness to let him sophisticate her. Eventually, Lolita leaves Humbert for the American Quilty, who does not bore her with high culture or grand passions.

Humbert’s passion for Lolita defies easy psychological analysis, and throughout Lolita Humbert mocks psychiatry’s tendency toward simplistic, logical explanations. In the foreword to Lolita, Dr. John Ray, Jr., claims that Humbert’s tale will be of great interest to psychiatry, but throughout his memoir Humbert does his best to discredit the entire field of study, heaping the most scorn on Freudian psychology. For example, he enjoys lying to the psychiatrists at the sanitarium. He reports mockingly that Pratt, the headmistress of Lolita’s school, diagnoses Lolita as sexually immature, wholly unaware that she actually has an overly active sex life with Humbert himself. By undermining the authority and logic of the psychiatric field, Nabokov demands that readers view Humbert as a unique and deeply flawed human being, but not an insane one. Humbert further thwarts efforts of scientific categorization by constantly describing his feelings for Lolita as an enchantment or spell, closer to magic than to science. He tries to prove that his love is not a mental disease but an enormous, strange, and uncontrollable emotion that resists easy classification. Nabokov himself was deeply critical of psychiatry, and Lolita is, in a way, an attack on the field.

Humbert and Lolita are both alienated from the societies with which they are familiar, they find themselves in an ambiguous moral territory where the old rules seem not to apply. Humbert chooses exile and comes willingly from Europe to America, while Lolita is forced into exile when Charlotte dies. She becomes detached from her familiar community of Ramsdale and goes on the road with Humbert. Together, they move constantly and belong to no single fixed place. The tourists Humbert and Lolita meet on the road are similarly transient, belonging to a generic America rather than to a specific place. In open, unfamiliar territory, Humbert and Lolita form their own set of rules, where normal sexual and familial relationships become twisted and corrupt. Both Humbert and Lolita have become so disconnected from ordinary society that neither can fully recognize how morally depraved their actions are. Humbert cannot see his own monstrosity, and Lolita shows only occasional awareness of herself of a victim. Though Humbert sweeps Lolita away so that they can find a measure of freedom, their exile ultimately traps them. Lolita is bound to Humbert because she has nowhere else to go, and though Humbert dreams of leaving America with Lolita, he eventually accepts that he will stay in America until he dies. Though each of them undergoes one final exile, Lolita to Dick Schiller and Humbert to prison, it is clear that they are first and foremost alienated from their own selves, an exile so final that they could never return to their original places in the worlds that they left.

In Lolita, language effectively triumphs over shocking content and gives it shades of beauty that perhaps it does not deserve. Lolita is filled with awful and vile subjects, including rape, murder, pedophilia, and incest. However, Humbert Humbert, in telling his story, uses puns, literary allusions, and repeating linguistic patterns to render this dark tale in an enchanting form. Humbert seduces his readers as fully and slyly as he seduces Lolita herself. Words are his power, and he uses them to distract, confuse, and charm. He is a pedophile and a murderer, but he builds up elaborate defences and explanations for his actions, and his language shields him from judgment. With Lolita, Nabokov’s ultimate achievement may be that he forces readers to be complicit in Humbert’s crimes. In order to uncover the actual story of pedophilia, rape, and murder within the text, readers have to immerse themselves in Humbert’s words and their shadowy meanings—and thus they must enter Humbert’s mind. By engaging so closely with Humbert’s linguistic trickery, readers cannot hold him at a far enough distance to see him for the man he truly is.

Images of and references to butterflies and lepidopterology, the study of butterflies and moths, appear throughout the novel, emphasizing not only the physical similarities between the fragile insect and young Dolores but also the distant and clinical way in which Humbert views her. He effectively studies, captures, and pins her down, destroying the very delicate, living quality he so adores. Pretty much every time Humbert describes a nymphet, he uses such terms as frail, fragile, supple, silky, or fairy-like, all of which could just as easily describe butterflies. Like butterflies, nymphets are elusive, becoming ordinary teenagers in the blink of an eye. Dolores, in particular, undergoes a significant metamorphosis, changing from an innocent girl-child to an exhausted wife and mother-to-be. Next to such delicate creatures, Humbert becomes aware of his own monstrosity, often referring to himself as a lumbering brute.

Quilty is Humbert’s double in the novel and represents Humbert’s darker side. Humbert is evil in many ways, but Quilty is eviler, and his presence suggests that the line between good and evil is blurred rather than distinct. Humbert and Quilty seem near opposites for much of the novel. Humbert adores and worships Dolores, while Quilty uses and ultimately abandons her. Humbert presents his own feelings for Dolores as tender and Quilty’s as depraved. However, the men are more similar than different. Both are educated and literary. Both, of course, are pedophiles. Humbert sees himself as the force of good, avenging Lolita’s corruption, yet he himself originally stole Dolores of her innocence.
By the end of the novel, Humbert and Quilty become even more closely identified with one another. When Humbert and Dolores play tennis one day, Humbert leaves to take a phone call, and Quilty sneaks in on the game to briefly become Dolores’s partner. Dolores eventually leaves Humbert for Quilty, but her new life is hardly an improvement. When Humbert finally confronts Quilty, the men become one and the same as they struggle with each other. Humbert, describing their fight, says, “We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us" (Nabokov, 208). His jumbled use of the first-person and third-person plurals indicates that he and Quilty are no longer distinct from one another. The already blurred line between the two men has now disappeared entirely.

Almost all the characters in Lolita engage in games. Sometimes they consist of innocent amusement, such as Humbert trying to interest Dolores in tennis and dreams of making her a tennis star. Humbert also plays many silly games with Dolores to get her attention and to keep her compliant. This sense of play reinforces the fact that Dolores is still a child and that Humbert must constantly entertain her. Games also distract characters from more serious issues and allow them to hide sinister motives. Humbert and Godin play chess so that they can pass the time without revealing their true selves. Quilty, in particular, plays word games with his hotel aliases, leaving puzzles for Humbert to decipher. The characters play games to hide the feelings they cannot reveal, to further their own ends, and to dissuade those who seek to discover the truth, including readers. Though the games start out as innocuous and childlike, they soon become deadly manipulations.

Solipsism, which is the theory that one’s mind is the only entity certain to exist, has various moral implications that allow people with solipsistic views of their world to justify their mistreatment of others. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert, a self-proclaimed murderer and lover of “nymphets”, demonstrates a solipsistic worldview that causes him to see everything in relation to himself, creating new personas for various characters and only narrating the series of events from his perspective. Humbert’s solipsism makes him view everything that happens to him solely from his point of view, as he believes his mind is all that exists, therefore making the events that transpire solely acts of fate and the people he encounters figments of his imagination. Humbert’s solipsism compromises the reliability of his narration, as he describes characters exclusively from his point of view by stripping them of their individuality and describing them solely concerning himself; Humbert’s tendency to write exclusively from his point of view forces the reader to accept the series of events he presents as the truth, without any external input, allowing him to completely control the reader’s perception of him and the events of the novel.

Humbert's usage of irony alongside other word games diverts the reader's attention from the horrible acts he inflicts upon Dolores. But most of the irony of the book comes from the unreliable narration that Humbert provides. He claims Dolores seduced him and that she was in complete control of the relationship. However, Humbert, as the adult, clearly has the upper hand. He controls the money and Dolores’s freedom, and he often repeats that Dolores has nowhere to go if she leaves him. When Lolita occasionally shrinks from his touch, he views her reluctance as an example of her mercurial nature, rather than as a child’s repulsion at an adult’s sexual advances. Humbert claims that his feelings for Dolores are rooted in love, not lust, but his self-delusion prevents him from making this case convincingly. His dialogue becomes ironic as his actions directly discredit him.

Postmodernism arose in the early years of the twentieth century and represented, in part, a move away from the notion that a novel should tell a realistic story from an objective perspective. Postmodern writers are primarily interested in writing that evokes the fragmentary nature of experience and the complexity of language. Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Lolita, narrates the novel from a highly subjective point of view, and he uses rich, sophisticated language to do so. Lolita contains a vast variety of linguistic devices, including puns, multilingual expressions, artistic allusions, word patterns, and references to other works. These devices followed from the then-popular idea that a novel was not a fixed work of literature, but rather a more fluid, organic creation that was interconnected with other media.

Pynchon’s characters are exaggerated figures of American consumer capitalism who reveal that economic system’s misguided and inhuman impulses. Pierce Inverarity, Oedipa’s deceased ex-boyfriend who charges her with sorting out his estate, was a stereotypically greedy and egocentric businessman during his lifetime. He owned virtually everything in his hometown of San Narciso, California, and he dealt with nefarious actors like the mafioso Tony Jaguar and the hyper-patriotic defense contractor Yoyodyne. While Pierce never contributed to any identifiable social good, Oedipa realizes that his “legacy was America,” which makes it clear that he stands for the excesses of postwar America’s fully privatized economy. In contrast, Oedipa and her husband, Mucho, represent the disaffected middle class. Stuck at home, Oedipa is profoundly bored and has no meaningful relationships, and Mucho is a depressed radio DJ who feels utterly disconnected and purposeless at work. While Inverarity is busy making millions for no clear reason, Mucho and Oedipa are exhausted and unfulfilled. American capitalism, the novel seems to imply, does not make anybody’s lives any better.

The Crying of Lot 49 is definitely a novel of the 1960s: its protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is a conservative young housewife who feels stuck in suburban America and seeks an alternative to her boredom by adopting a wild conspiracy theory about an underground group of mail-carriers called Tristero. Oedipa shares the sense of profound alienation that many Americans felt in the 1960s, as their society became increasingly privatized, homogeneous, consumerist, and militaristic. California itself is alienated as Oedipa sees San Narciso as "“less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei.”But she also encounters various antiestablishment groups that symbolize famous political and countercultural movements from the 1960s, like the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the hippie subculture. Pynchon satirizes all of these trends and argues that counterculture replicated the errors of the dominant culture and became absorbed into the very structures it protested.

Oedipa dedicates all her time to figuring out these clues that point her to a centuries-long, anti-government conspiracy of mail carriers called Tristero, she never figures out precisely what Tristero is or if it even exists at all. Eventually, she realizes that she might have just become a paranoid conspiracy theorist, pursuing a fantasy with no basis in reality. However, Pynchon uses Oedipa’s fruitless investigation to show how everyone interprets the world just like Oedipa investigates Tristero and readers analyze literature. Namely, people select clues, extract significance from them, and weave meanings together into a narrative that forms their sense of reality. But Pynchon ultimately argues that these narratives are only ever subjective and tentative—while interpretation is an essential part of both living and reading, there can be no singular, authoritative truths about the meaning of life or art.

Oedipa eventually realizes that she will never learn the truth about Tristero and starts to question the very practice of interpretation, which she realizes can never lead people to absolute truths. Late in the book, Oedipa spends a night in San Francisco, where her experiences and dreams start blending together and she starts seeing the Tristero horn symbol absolutely everywhere. No longer able to distinguish real clues from imagined ones, she realizes that Tristero could just be a figment of her imagination—or even a complicated trick that Inverarity invented before his death. In fact, these interpretations are just as reasonable as Oedipa’s stubborn belief that Tristero is real, which shows that there are usually multiple, equally plausible interpretations of the same set of facts. Ultimately, Oedipa never solves the puzzle of Tristero. Rather, she learns to accept that “transcendent meaning” is unachievable, whether about Tristero or about anything else.

Oedipa pursues the shadowy Tristero organization as a detective and reader would, identifying clues that she weaves together into a grand conspiracy theory. The Tristero conspiracy takes shape when Oedipa coincidentally discovers clues ranging from a symbol representing a muted horn (which she later learns is Tristero’s emblem) to a reference to a “tryst with Trystero” in the fictional 17th-century play The Courier's Tragedy. As Oedipa analyzes these clues, she convinces herself that a secret mail system called Tristero is delivering messages all around the world, and she starts treating everything with suspicion. For instance, when her husband, Mucho, sends her a letter with a typo on the envelope, Oedipa even wonders if he could secretly be part of Tristero. Like a detective investigates a crime or a dedicated fiction-reader looks for symbolism in a novel, Oedipa develops a theory about Tristero by interpreting clues and then connecting them to “project a world”—or build a story about their underlying meaning. By turning Oedipa into a literary detective, Pynchon clearly connects her search for Tristero to his reader’s search for meaning in this novel.

Many of the problems with chaos found in the novel are tied to the idea of communication. The major symbol of order in the novel, Maxwell's Demon, cannot be operated because it requires a certain unattainable level of communication. Letters in the novel, which should be clear and direct forms of stable communication, are pretty meaningless. The novel also contains a mail-delivery group that requires its members to mail a letter once a week even if they have nothing to say. The letter that Oedipa receives in chapter one may itself be meaningless, since it is the first step in what may be nothing more than a big joke played on Oedipa. The religious moment Oedipa experiences in chapter two seems to promise the possibility of some kind of communication being communicated, but the process breaks down. Religion, language, science, all subjects that promote communication that give a sense of wholeness, do not correctly function in the novel.

Lot 49 is full of puns and language games of all sorts. Like, the odd names of the novel's characters are a type of play on different words and their symbolic baggage. Another example is the concept of the word "lot" in the title, which actually occurs several times in the book but does not relate to anything in the story until the last few pages. Also, we see that Mucho's radio station spells "fuck" when read in reverse, forming another little language game that does not have necessarily any inherent meaning but does indicate an interest in manipulating language for intellectual enjoyment. Language is the means through which the story is communicated, and Pynchon has chosen to use a language full of jokes, puns, and satire. Science seems to stand in opposition to the chaos of language that all of Pynchon's manipulation suggests. Science is ordered and coherent and offers a body of definite knowledge that all can study. And yet, even the coherence of science is undermined in the existence of Maxwell's Demon and the figure of Dr. Hilarius. Though pure science may offer coherence, the uses to which that science is put, the interpretations imposed on that science, can scatter that coherence to the wind.

At the end of Lot 49 Oedipa Maas finds herself alone and alienated from that society, having lost touch with the life she used to lead before she began her attempt to uncover the mystery of the Tristero. The drug culture plays a big part in this sense of isolation. The world around Oedipa seems to be a world perpetually on drugs, manic, and full of conspiracies and illusions. And though that world is exciting and new, it is also dangerous: drugs contribute to the destruction of Oedipa's marriage, and drugs cause Hilarius to go insane. Oedipa hallucinates so often that she seems to be constantly high, and ultimately, this brings her nothing but a sense of chaotic alienation.

Epistemology, "the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge" (Britannica), is broached in The Crying of Lot 49 with the pervasiveness of Oedipa's paranoia. Pynchon uses Oedipa's growing paranoia to question everything she comes in contact with. Oedipa struggles with revelations or versions of events that cannot be verified from the outside, that has disturbed her sense of reality. Oedipa soon begins to believe that she has gone mad. Lot 49 does not ease nor solve the feelings of paranoia, it rather brings up more and more strange, unsolvable instances, and lets them hang there, all tangled together. Oedipa's search is not only for Tristero but for a philosophical explanation of existence as well.

Pynchon utilizes ironic humour that teeters on the edge of dark subjects. This can be best seen when the reader learns the story of an executive at an electronics and rockets company who is replaced by an IBM 7094. His wife immediately leaves him, and, after several weeks of deliberating, he decides to immolate himself like the Buddhist monks who protested the Vietnam War. But after he covers himself in gasoline and is about to light the match, his wife comes home with her new lover: the efficiency expert who fired the executive. The efficiency expert sees what he is doing, and says: "Nearly three weeks it takes him to decide. You know how long it would've taken the IBM 7094? Twelve micro-seconds." (5.71) Pynchon seems to view all of his subject matter through a darkly ironic mirror, and often sacrifices realism for absurdist comedy or plots so complex that they can only be born out of paranoia. We don't sense that the narrator has much sympathy for any of the characters (with an exception, possibly, for the Maas's). In fact, Pynchon hardly even takes the time to give most characters an identity beyond an absurd name like Genghis Cohen.

Existentialism is "a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will" (Oxford Dictionary). Lot 49 is very existential as Oedipa grapples with the meaning behind her discoveries surrounding WASTE and Tristero. She numbs herself to avoid meaninglessness, sensitizes herself to fabricate meaning, becomes conscious of this fabrication, and collapses into and subsequently overcomes existential nihilism. As Oedipa uses her newfound sensitivity to weave a world of countless connections and fantastic conspiracies, her arc follows her absurd quest to construct order in her world and thus avoid the anguishing existential nihilist crisis of facing meaninglessness or nonexistence.

Postmodernism arose in the early years of the twentieth century and represented, in part, a move away from the notion that a novel should tell a realistic story from an objective perspective. Postmodern writers are primarily interested in writing that evokes the fragmentary nature of experience and the complexity of language. Oedipa's journey succinctly taps into the facets of postmodernism as the story utilizes a confusing writing style, word games, and a highly unrealistic story that shows a housewife grows more and more paranoid as she tries to find the answer to the Tristero conspiracy.

On Gethen, there are two dominant religions. The first is Yomeshta, which follows the teaching of Meshe and resembles a Judeo-Christian religion. The second is Handdara, a spiritual practice closer to Taoism. Yomeshta is centred around the idea of light, and unity. In contrast, Handdara is interested in the interaction of light and dark, and in the way opposites can come together and complement each other. Although both religions are described in-depth, the novel more closely aligns itself with the Handdara philosophy. Gethen is a world of both light and dark. Its people are both men and women. As a result, the Handdara interest in opposites that clarify or balance each other better describes the planet and its inhabitants than does the pure, uncomplicated light of Yomeshta. Handdara is a religion of dualism — the self and the other, the known and the unknown, the light and the dark. This explicitly reflects Gethenian sexuality — every person has a dual identity and is both a man and a woman. In contrast, the Yomeshta say “man’s singularity is his divinity,” however the narrative makes it clear that Gethenian’s divinity comes from their duality. Even the title of the book is a celebration of duality; it comes from a Handdarata proverb, which goes, “Light is the left hand of darkness / and darkness the right hand of light. / Two are one, life and death, lying / together like lovers in kemmer, / like hands joined together, / like the end and the way.” Yomeshta attempts to celebrate only life, but Handdara understands that for life to be properly celebrated, it must be set up in contrast to its opposite, death. Ai compares Handdara, and the Gethenians themselves, to the Terran concept of yin and yang. He says, “Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male,” each pair of opposites exists within each resident of Gethen.

A central conflict in The Left Hand of Darkness is the enormous divide between Ai and the people of Gethen. Each is alien to the other and must learn to practise empathy to fully collaborate and communicate. Ai’s mission is one of connectedness, but it first requires convincing the people of Gethen to join an interplanetary organization they’ve just heard of and do not understand. This requires Ai to understand the people of Gethen to better advocate for his cause, and for them to accept him as a human being worth listening to. Ai’s otherness makes his task more difficult, but it also makes him a perfect narrator. Ai, who was born on Terra, is more similar to the reader than the Gethenians are, and so the reader can experience their otherness through the lens of an anthropological explorer. However, although Ai and the people of Gethen are very different culturally and biologically, Ai can connect with individual Gethenians, which allows him insight into the planet as a whole. Le Guin's message is clear, extended acts of othering are dangerous, and that a lack of empathy can fracture a nation or a world, leading to violent conflict. However, a single connection with another person can serve as the basis for national, or even universal alliances and unity.

Le Guin wrote her novel amid the Second Wave of feminism, a time when American women were fighting for legal protection for equal rights and equal pay. She saw how women were mistreated or dismissed and felt that society was divided. In writing The Left Hand of Darkness, she says in a 1993 essay, she “eliminated gender to find out what was left.” Le Guin hoped that by creating a genderless society she would be able to see how gender shaped culture, by looking at what culture could be when built around something other than a gender binary. On a more personal scale, Gethenian people are not burdened by gender expectations. Since there are no men and women, one group cannot be stereotypically soft and gentle, or the other aggressive and domineering. The male tendency toward domineering behaviour and away from vulnerability can be easily seen in Genly Ai’s character. Estraven observes that Ai “considers crying either evil or shameful,” and he notices that Ai turns his face from him when crying, as if ashamed. Ai, for his part observes that “most Karhiders cry easily, being no more ashamed of tears than of laughter.” Their easy weeping contrasts with his manly stoicism. Estraven also notices that Ai is physically stronger, more likely to take risks, and more temperamental than most Gethenians.

Epistemology, "the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge" (Britannica), is shown in The Left Hand of Darkness through the multiple voices and styles in narration. Ai Genly, an alien envoy sent to Gethen, and Estraven, a native of Gethen, are the primary narrators, and together the two of them present a fairly conventional, chronological story. Other chapters, however, make use of documents such as field reports, religious texts, and folktales to help tell the story. Individually, each of these texts and perspectives sheds light on a single facet of the world of Le Guin’s novel, but when taken together, the various viewpoints create an expansive, multifaceted picture of Gethen. Each type of story—from Ai’s report, to Estraven’s diary, to myths, field notes, and religious works—presents its own version of the truth. Each voice speaks with authority, and although different accounts sometimes come into conflict, the essential truths of the stories resonate even when the literal events they report didn't happen.

Loyalty and duty are the glue that holds the Gethenian society together. Some bonds of loyalty are seen as more honourable than others. Generally, selfless obligations are regarded as admirable and worthy of aspiring to, whereas loyalty to oneself, or loyalty to one group of people at the expense of another group, is reproachable. Estraven and Genly Ai, for example, nobly serve the whole of humanity and are willing to sacrifice their lives for their cause. In contrast, Tibe, Karhide’s prime minister, cares more about how Karhide can increase his prestige than that of the nation itself. Monogamous loving relationships form the foundation of much of Gethenian society. Although marriage is not a legally recognized institution, many couples will vow kemmering to each other, which “socially and ethically is an ancient and vigorous institution.” This relationship implies duty and responsibility between the two partners, and between the parents and any children they might have, which after many generations can lead to a community held together by webs of familial bonds. In her field notes, and Inspector even hypothesizes “the whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains is indubitably based upon the institution of monogamous marriage.”

By showcasing status and cultural differences Le Guin mimics the format of ethnography to tell the story from an emic and etic perspective worthy of her father, eminent anthropologist Alfred L. Krober. One sort of ethnographic account can be seen on page twelve, “Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes." Anthropologists want to get to know people from their own perspective. This also hinted that Ai would not have been able to see the world through their eyes without the interaction between himself and Estraven—without jail and the journey across the ice, the relationship between the peoples of Gethen and the Ekumen may not have happened.

The opening of the book suggests that Genly Ai is the structuring consciousness of the book, that his "story" is not only those sections he tells in his person, but the selection and ordering of everything that appears. That Genly includes Therem's narrative in the latter's own words, that Genly places legends, myths, tales, field notes as they were told or written, instead of hammering them into his single-perspective, linear narrative reflects the "I-Thou" understanding he achieves through the experiences related in the novel. That Genly is immediately the architect of the entire book is implied in his comments about altered voices, and his recognition that, although he cannot say whose story it is, he knows that it is all one story. This notion is further corroborated by apparently off-hand comments such as "He [Therem] lay in the tent writing, in a little notebook, in his small, rapid, vertical-cursive Karhidish hand, the account that appears as the previous chapter." The book can be read as a kind of bildungsroman, where we share in the central character's process of growth.

Thought experiments are windows into the fundamental nature of things. A philosophical thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in the “laboratory of the mind” that depicts something that often exceeds the bounds of current technology or even is incompatible with the laws of nature, but that is supposed to reveal something philosophically enlightening or fundamental about the topic in question. Thought experiments can demonstrate a point, entertain, illustrate a puzzle, lay bare a contradiction in thought, and move us to provide further clarification. In this way, Science Fiction becomes its own thought experiment as sci-fi authors imagine the world minus/plus one crucial element. To Le Guin this crucial element is the elimination of gender on Gethen.

Le Guin utilizes world reduction in order to showcase the main focus of her novel - the question of gender. By eliminating gender Le Guin shows that reality is not dependent on that concept. Le Guin also reduces outside stimuli such as time, war, industry, and animals as rather than focusing on the planet as a whole (including all the elements as listed previously) and instead focuses solely on Genly's ability to connect with the Gethenians over their differing sexual aspects.

Christianity—represented as, more or less, Atonism—is aggressive, affiliated with colonizers, racists, and oppressors throughout history. It has a singular worldview and is intent on establishing hierarchies. By contrast, Jonathan Lewis states, "Neo-HooDoo is...a liberating poetics": there are multiple gods and spirits, and its practice eschews domination, hegemony, and empiricism.

Mumbo Jumbo is seemingly a detective novel, and many of the elements of the genre are present here, but Reed undermines this by suggesting that a process of detection does not have to utilize ratiocination, be fully rational or objective, or have a teleological conclusion. There is not really one "truth" to uncover, the end does not offer the closure one would expect, and the detectives do not behave as the genre would dictate they should.

Reed tells his story not just through words but also through images, populating his novel with photographs and drawings. This suggests an outside narrator who is compiling the document that is Mumbo Jumbo (a metanarrative paralleled by Jes Grew). It also, as Keren Omry writes, "requires of readers an entirely new way of reading. To gain the full effect of the technique, readers must resist the temptation to ignore these pictures or reduce them to a loose verbal translation." Both forms of "reading" are necessary.

As Reed says in his novel, time isn't a river: it's a pendulum. What he means by this is that linear, chronological conceptions of time, especially in the rendering of history and fiction, are not effective or accurate in conveying what things are really like. There are dialogues between eras, a return to and a return of the past in the present.

Mumbo Jumbo is a mythic/magic epic centered in places like New Orleans and Harlem during the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The story depicts the struggle between Jes Grew, the black cultural impulse, and Western monotheistic tradition, which Reed calls the Atonists.

In the Western industrialized world, time is seen as a progression of events, the present building on the past as civilization becomes more "advanced." However, in the African conception of time, "the human being goes backward ...he is oriented toward the world of the ancestors, toward those who no longer belong to the world of the living." Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo problematizes the relationship between past and present. Rejecting both the ideas of "progress" and of strict adherence to tradition, he advocates instead improvisation--responding and adapting to immediacy without uprooting one's connections to the past.

Mumbo Jumbo situates the history of African American culture in the language of genetics, information theory, biocultural evolutionism and sonic/vibrant materialism. Reed's motif of “Jes Grew,” as an evolving acoustic force that can be heard through radio technology, signifies a medium of information storage and transfer; it stores and transfers black cultural information in a viral form. Such a biosonic construction of African American experience provides lots of room to explore the marginalization and rehabilitation of black ontological forces. By dramatizing the production and transmission of black tonality, Reed's trope of “Jes Grew” signals vibrational forces that counteract Western, white cultural norms. Mumbo Jumbo's trope of the Jes Grew virus participates in, and advances, the aesthetic politics of Afrofuturism, in which Jes Grew's bio-sonic effects enable us to contest the narrow humanism of Eurocentric biopolitics with an Afrofuturist sonic materialism.

Mumbo Jumbo participates in the postmodern tradition on the basis that it is, both formally and thematically, a postmodern deconstruction of modern epistemology and politics and that it offers and experiments with artistic forms and epistemological paradigms alternative to the modern categorization of African American art and African Americans as the other. The entire idea revolves around freedom, freedom of thought, body, language, of heart and spirit, which defies the constraints and norms of society. Reed steps outside the boundaries of the traditional narrative. Blurring the lines between historical facts and fiction, reality and fantasy, as one of the prominent characteristics of a postmodern narrative, is omnipresent in Mumbo Jumbo.