A Comparison of Crying of Lot 49 and White Noise Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 has a lot in common with Don DeLillo's book White Noise. Both novels strangely share some character types, parts of plot structure, and themes. The similarities of these two works clearly indicate a cultural conception shared by two influential and respected contemporary authors. Character similarities in the two novels are found both in the main characters and in some who are tangential to the plots. The two protagonists of the works, Oedipa Maas of Lot 49 and Jack Gladney of White Noise, are characters who struggle to make sense of their worlds, yet both are afraid to face the pure, filtered truth. Oedipa is inadvertently sent on a quest, which she embraces as a possible mechanism for bringing new meaning to the world of Tupperware parties. During her journey Oedipa is inundated with new and disconcerting information that could be a series of clues about a counterculture or Pierce Inverarity's attempt to extend beyond his death. This dichotomy sets up the theme of binary opposites in the novel. Oedipa's journey does not end with the final choice of one kingdom or the other, confirming one of the novel's other assertions that excluded intermediate subjects are "bad shit" (J. Kerry Grant eloquently discusses Oedipa's journey in terms of binary opposites and the search for meaning in the introduction to his A Companion to "The Crying of Lot 49" (pp. xv-xvi)). Jack Gladney also involves himself and his family in a series of journeys, which are in search of security and understanding, but share the experience of Oedipa focus on the search for a new reason for existence. Jack and his wife Babbette are afraid of dying. Their worries, conversations, ... middle of paper ... comfort en masse, Babette runs up the stairs of a football stadium, and they both become embroiled in Dylar's intensely neurotic conspiracy. The concept of framing, the reduction of something to a representation that man produces and consumes, is also prevalent in both of these novels. In White Noise the most obvious examples are "The Most Photographed Barn in America" ​​(pp.12-13) and Nature TV, and in Lot 49 it can be seen in the reservoir, Lake Inverarity. Framing is an example of both the possibility of a meta-conspiracy and humanity's attempt to protect itself from reality. The mass-produced and easily consumable objects and ideas that appear in both novels are presented as the possible result of a conspiracy to homogenize and control people, or an attempt by people to distance themselves from the real world and the truth..