Strange Attractors

Abstract

This thesis investigates how chaos theory, as both scientific paradigm and literary metaphor, informs narrative structure, thematic development, and character formation in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Stephen King. Focusing primarily on The Crying of Lot 49 and “Entropy” by Pynchon and The Dark Tower series by King, the study traces the ways in which concepts such as entropy, strange attractors, nonlinear dynamics, and recursive systems operate within postmodern and contemporary fiction. Drawing on theoretical frameworks by N. Katherine Hayles, Gordon Slethaug, Merja Polvinen, and Brian McHale, the thesis argues that Pynchon and King, despite their stylistic and generic differences, construct narrative worlds that reflect the complex, unstable, and self-organizing logics of chaotic systems.

In Pynchon’s fiction, chaos emerges through epistemological overload, paranoia, and interpretive uncertainty, as exemplified by Oedipa Maas’s descent into semiotic saturation in Lot 49. The Tristero system functions as a strange attractor: elusive, generative, and structurally central yet never resolved. In contrast, King’s Dark Tower series develops a cosmology of mythic recursion and multiversal instability, where identity and temporality are continually reconfigured through feedback and repetition. The Tower itself operates as a strange attractor, organizing the narrative without providing resolution. Across both bodies of work, chaos is not merely thematic but structural: stories unfold through loops, recursive motifs, and fragmented coherence, offering a literary model of complexity in which pattern arises from disorder.

Ultimately, this comparative study demonstrates that chaos theory provides not only a vocabulary for describing narrative fragmentation but a framework for reimagining literary form. In the hands of Pynchon and King, chaos becomes a mode of meaning-making, where uncertainty is not failure but form.