Although the novels of Thomas Pynchon are filled with ecological elements of all the biological worlds, few critics have ventured to offer an explanation of these facts. Accordingly this dissertation argues the ecological imagination not mentioned unt...
Although the novels of Thomas Pynchon are filled with ecological elements of all the biological worlds, few critics have ventured to offer an explanation of these facts. Accordingly this dissertation argues the ecological imagination not mentioned until now. Throughout his novels, Pynchon insists that imperialist and consumerist ideologies are indeed self-destructive, namely, the negative side of Pynchon's positive ecological message. Particularly to both the imperialists and the post-consumerists, the native Dodes, the Kirghiz, the Maltses, and the Hereros seem too alien to be part of nature. In these relationships, the other is seen as so alien to the self that it can and must be cut off. There are extreme differences between the central culture and the spatializing culture, or the Elects and the Preterites. The emphasis of the co-existence between the self and the other is that Pynchon is meant to stress the important meaning of the ecological relations between all the biological worlds.