OK, Oedipa told herself, stalking around the room, her viscera hollow, waiting on something truly terrible,

OK. It's unavoidable, isn't it? Every access route to the Tristero could be traced also back to the Inverarity estate. Even Emory Bortz, with his copy of Blobb's Peregrinations (bought, she had no doubt he'd tell her in the event she asked, also at Zapf's), taught now at San Narciso College, heavily endowed by the dead man.

Meaning what? That Bortz, along with Metzger, Cohen, Driblette, Koteks, the tattooed sailor in San Francisco, the W.A.S.T.E. carriers she'd seen-that all of them were Pierce Inverarity's men? Bought? Or loyal, for free, for fun, to some grandiose practical joke he'd cooked up, all for her embarrassment, or terrorizing, or moral improvement?

Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge, and /or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the hall; light of that afternoon's vanity mirror. Either way, they'll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and Pierce Inverarity only knows what-all besides, all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.

Basic set up:

After one of her ex-boyfriends dies and leaves her to handle his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas uncovers a string of weird facts and scenarios. It causes her to become paranoid about those around her and leads her to doubt her own sanity.

Paranoia is an ongoing theme in this book and only increases as Oedipa Maas finds herself drawn deeper and deeper into the mysteries surrounding her ex's estate. But if we're dealing with a conspiracy, it doesn't seem to hinge on murder, money, or the usual stuff—instead, it resolves around…the postal system. That's right: our heroine has found herself on the trail of a mysterious postal service run by a group going by the name Tristero. By the point at which this quote takes place, Oedipa has found herself deep in the conspiracy and is worrying that everyone around her seems to be part of it... so could it just be in her head?

Rather than depicting some grand political conspiracy, Pynchon takes a postmodern route: the lead character is a suburban housewife and the conspiracy (which, in similarly postmodern fashion, is never fully explained or concluded) revolves around a routine service. It's as though paranoia is no longer confined to some small corner but has entered into the language of popular culture. The fact that neither we nor Oedipa know the purpose of the conspiracy just makes it seem all that more mysterious and widespread.

The jumble of words in this passage gives us a look into Oedipa's confusion. She's pretty deep into the conspiracy by this point, and if we put ourselves in her shoes (as we're encouraged to do), we can relate to her confusion and self-doubt. She veers from one possibility to another, wondering if everyone is in on it—whatever it is—and why she has been made a part of it. She toys with the idea of changing her name, only to tell herself that "they" will call her paranoid. This gets her thinking about the different possibilities: has she genuinely become embroiled in some massive conspiracy? Is she dreaming/hallucinating? Or has she gone mad?

There's some major confusion going on here, and that fits with the style of the novel as whole. This is one postmodern text that's more about questions than solutions.

P.S. As a postmodern writer, Pynchon is self-aware in his references to conspiracy theories and paranoia (e.g., the novel includes a wannabe-Beatles group called The Paranoids).