Art of Reading - The Crying of Lot 49 - Reading Response

1) Snigger - "He took his tie out of the gasoline and started to snigger."
Snigger is an alteration of the word "snicker" and means the same. Snigger dates back to 1706. (93)

Eschatology - "Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do nothing but sign his name to specialized memorandum he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of the specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive's first thoughts were naturally of suicide."

Eschatology is a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humankind.

2) In trying to apply the theory of signification to my reading of The Crying of Lot 49 I was able to further question the meaning of the words of the text in the sense that I perceived the text as having an underlying meaning able to be opened by a careful examination of the diction of the work. This allowed me to open my perspective of symbolism, character, metaphor, and point-of-view so I could dig deeper into the story.

3) The Crying of Lot 49 is about one woman's pointless search of a pointless secret organization. Lot 49 deals deeply with the eschatology of modern society in that it portrays a woman who is seeking something that is never really found while executing the will of a dead man whom she never really loved and thus she is never really fulfilled. It is a sad satire cataloging an brief period of a characters life while she is searching for something that really is insignificant.