‘Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely’: Serious Openings and Subversive Epigraphs in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

People often think that reading a novel is a very linear activity. You start at the start and proceed through the text. As in most media forms, though, the beginning of any novel is really not truly its beginning. The American author, Thomas Pynchon, the focus of my paper today, is famed, it could be argued, mostly for three things.