In the following essay, Gleason examines the postmodern attributes and "labyrinthine" structure of The Crying of Lot 49, particularly as found in the novel's indeterminate language, puns, "symbolic landscape, narrative design, and sexual dynamics."

The experiences of the main character—Oedipa Maas—and the reader are too much alike for the main point of [The Crying of Lot 49] to be other than precisely the terrible ambiguity with which it leaves us. (p. 93) [In this book] Pynchon is exploiting the diametrically opposite meanings which "entropy" has in thermodynamics and in information theory. Metaphorically, one compensates the other. Here is the narrator describing the Nefastis Machine, an invention whose structure lies at ...