Holy sinners: narrative betrayal and thematic machination in Thomas Mann’s and Thomas Pynchon’s novels

Abstract

This study draws comparatively on a modern novel—the biblical tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers by Thomas Mann—and on a postmodern—The Crying of Lot 49—by Thomas Pynchon. The two authors embark on the same path, although each one in accordance with his own literary age. They astutely highlight a series of illicit but conspicuous transactions between the narrator and his reader, intended to expose the sophisticated machinations of literature and to belie its sweeping “realist” claims. It is not a coincidence that the plots of both novels evolve around various types of machination and betrayal.