Although the main action of V. is set in the middle 1950s, interpolated material extends the time frame of the novel back to the end of the nineteenth century and allows Pynchon to view the entire twentieth century as a decline into decadence (the social and political equivalent of entropy). Another central feature of the novel is the opposition of the tendency toward dissolution and disorganization by various cabals and conspiracies, some noble, some sinister, some merely silly, all failures. Pynchon implies that the decay has gone too far to be arrested.