What seemed a private quest on the part of Pynchon's Oedipa Maas has suddenly turned public. The dead Pierce Inverarity has left behind not a private game for a former girlfriend, but a shared legacy: even in this atomized and narcissistic postmodern culture Oedipa sees that she remains part of a community, one among many of the collective inheritors of “America.” Perhaps this comes as an unexpected revelation in a novel so preoccupied by what divides rather than unites people, but it is also a deeply significant one because it speaks to the novel's resources as a form. That is, because novels are typically both subjective and intersubjective, about social existence but also about individual experiences of social existence, among all the major literary genres this is the one most strongly associated with the imagining and perpetuation of communities. If there's one reason why the novel is the dominant literary form in the world today, this may be it.

Representing the part and the whole

A novel makes a part of something stand for the whole thing. Rhetoricians call this trope “synecdoche,” the figure of speech by which a poem's sheep are “fleeces” and its ships “masts.”