The image of the artist alone in his room is a familiar one, almost mandatory for any contemporary writer suspected of self-conscious narration. Pynchon does not disappoint his readers. His first novel [V.] provides a stereotype so clearly drawn that no one can miss the point. Fausto Maijstral is a poet and he is alone in his room…. To occupy the room is to accept the closed system as the environment of fiction and entropy as the metaphor for memory. What is a story if it is not a digression? While Fausto is not the only storyteller in Pynchon's world, he is the only one who self-consciously talks about his craft. It would be a mistake to regard Fausto as a stand-in for Pynchon, but it would be a greater mistake not to recognize Pynchon's closed world in Fausto's room. The poet's confession may be as much Pynchon's playful apology for his earlier narrative voice as it is Fausto's…. (pp. 7-8)
If Pynchon's fictional world is a closed system, then it must be subject to entropy; and yet fiction is nothing more than language—a system of logic and order, even if the implicit order is not always obvious in its manifestations. How can order represent chaos?… In Pynchon reality lies hidden beneath the inherent logic of language. Fausto gives up the psychological self for eyes clear enough to see past logic and order. The reader, however, is in much the same position as the heroine of [The Crying of Lot 49]. (p. 10)
