‘Obviously, the frustration and anxiety Oedipa experiences at the overabundance of information and proliferation of meaningless signifiers is often shared by the Internet user. The vast majority of the information on the Internet is insignificant to the vast majority of users, a lot of it is insignificant to all the users. For the purposes of this thesis, for instance, it would have been impossible to restrict my research merely to the material available on the Internet, the definitive criticism on these three writers all still resides in a library of paper and shelves, and this despite the vast quantities of data on the web. That leaves a lot of information to be sorted and interpreted for only modest reward. Oedipa experiences an exaggerated version of the same syndrome, the more information she sorts and interprets, the more profound becomes her confusion, and the more intense her paranoia. (…)

The experience of web browsing puts us in the role of Oedipa, when ideally we would like to be the Demon. We are constantly required to sort information, yet the impossibility of being that ‘ideal insomniac’ poses us with the new Oedipal difficulty, we are unable to comprehend the whole,ultimate knowledge and understanding eludes us. Browsing can be disorienting because it lacks a predefined endpoint. One can browse and browse, clicking from hyperlink to hyperlink, and never reach any form of closure or resolution, finally being forced to log off due to the relentless pressures of time. By deferring closure in leaving Oedipa awaiting the final revelation, awaiting the crying of lot 49, Pynchon forces us to acknowledge that there can never be a mastery of information. (…) This sense of imminent revelation hangs over the novel, and by leaving us at the moment the auctioneer, with his arms outstretched as if a ‘descending angel’, promises revelation, Pynchon is denying Oedipa, and more crucially the reader, a conclusion, as if saying we will never answer those questions, we can communicate, but we can never know, we are faced inexorably with ambiguity and entropy. Uncertainty, Heisenberg called that.’

— Davin O’Dwyer, Searching for Cyberspace: Joyce, Borges and Pynchon (2002)