Browsing by Subject "War on drugs"

This thesis argues that Thomas Pynchon’s California Trilogy conveys a political message in opposition to the forces that use the war on drugs for their own benefit. While taking a postmodern approach to its aesthetics, Pynchon’s trilogy addresses these themes by highlighting the importance of counterculture communities that formed around marijuana in the 1960s. To access these questions, this thesis combines close reading, postmodern theories, and research by several Pynchon scholars such as McHale (1987; 2011), Cowart (2011) and Veggian (2014) to form the approach of the study on the postmodern and the politics in the California Trilogy. As this thesis suggests, a certain “incredulity,” as the main element of postmodernity, seems to be present in Pynchon’s trilogy, especially in the counterculture enclaves of Vineland County in Vineland and Gordita Beach in Inherent Vice. Such incredulity can be seen in the ways that these communities abandon the traditional hegemony of mainstream power structures, instead opting to form their own. The main elements of postmodernism that this study recognizes in the trilogy are those of double-coding, irony, and pastiche. Hence, this thesis examines Pynchon’s tendency to discuss even the political war on drugs with his trademark humor, drawing connections between literary realism and postmodernism. This thesis argues that with the postmodern California Trilogy, Pynchon can discuss the war on drugs with postmodern levity, instead of realistic gravity.