Ontological ambiguity permeates Thomas Pynchon’s characters: Time and again, they hover between existence and nonexistence. Sometimes it is just a passing feeling that the character is not really alive; sometimes characters that were supposed to be dead enter the narrative scene; sometimes characters are so abstract and conceptualized that it makes one wonder whether they exist at all as positive entities – and often all of this may occur within the same novel.

Ontologically unstable characters, the frequency of Spiritualism and other paranormal themes, violence, mass destruction, and apocalyptic imagery – all contribute to Pynchon’s labeling as a death-obsessed writer. Criticism has often portrayed death as a kind of monolithic theme in his work: the sinister dark side that counterpoints the narrative extravaganza of characters, plots, subplots, settings, discourses and styles, topics, historical minutiae, humor, and so on. But death in Pynchon is just as multifaceted as its supposed opposite, life.