There are two levels of participation within The Crying of Lot 49: that of the characters, such as Oedipa Maas, whose world is limited to the text, and that of the reader, who looks at the world from the outside but who is also influenced by the world created by the text.3 Both the reader and the characters have the same problems in observing the chaos around them. The protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Mass, like the reader, is forced to engage in deciphering the clues or not participate at all.4 The philosophy behind The Crying of Lot 49 seems to lie in the synthesis of modern philosophers and physicists. Ludwig Wittgenstein viewed the world as a "totality of facts, not of things."1 This idea can be combined with physicists' view of the world as a closed system tending towards chaos. Pynchon states that the measure of the world is its entropy.2 He extends this metaphor to his imaginary world. He envelops the reader, through various means, within the system of The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon designed The Crying of Lot 49 so that there were two levels of observation: that of characters like our Oedipa Maas, whose world is limited to the text, and that of the reader, who looks at the world from the outside but who is also influenced by his relationship with that world.3 Both the reader and the characters have the same problems observing the chaos around them. The protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Mass, like Pynchon's audience, is forced to engage in deciphering clues or not participate at all.4Oedipa's goal, beyond executing a will, is to find meaning in a dominated life from assaults on people's perceptions through drugs... half of the document... rying of Lot 49," Mindful Pleasures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 3.5 John Johnston. "Paranoia as a Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49, "New Essays on the Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.6 "Paranoia", p. 4.7 The Grim Phoenix, p. 15.8 Crying of Lot 49, p 49.9 Robert Hipkiss, The American Absurd, (University of Chicago: New York), p. 90 10 Paranoia as a semiotic regime, p. 1.15 The crying of lot 49, p. 69.16 The crying of lot 49, p.. 124.