23 pages • 46 minutes read
Thomas PynchonEntropy
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Meatball Mulligan
Meatball is a central character in this story, but he is also something of a cipher. We know him as the host of an ongoing party and know his attitude towards the party and his guests to be one of bemused resignation. He does not seem to be particularly enthusiastic about any of his guests—invited or uninvited—but neither does he go as far as to kick anyone out. Even when his party is crashed by a group of thuggish US Navy men who mistakenly believe the apartment to be a brothel, Mulligan’s demeanor remains mild. He says to them merely, “This is not a house of ill repute. I’m sorry, really I am” (94).
The nickname “Meatball” suggests a straightforward and prosaic nature, and it also suggests someone very American. Although Meatball is part of a hip, sophisticated circle of European expatriates (such as his Hungarian friend Sandor Rojas) and disaffected American intellectuals (such as his friend Saul), he himself does not seem especially tortured or complicated. He seems rather like an easygoing creature of the moment, his American-ness coming through in his apparent absence of history (the only thing that we learn about his background is that his given name was Gerry, after the jazz man Gerry Mulligan) and in his disregard for the past. This disregard finally serves to detach him from his immediate surroundings. In this way, he can be viewed as a complementary opposite to Callisto—his Italian upstairs neighbor—who lives almost entirely in the past, and who at the same time seems to have a clearer sense than Mulligan of the existential dangers of the present.
Callisto
Callisto is the other main character in this story and serves as a counterpoint to Mulligan. He is European where Mulligan is American, middle-aged where Mulligan is younger, and preoccupied with the weight of history where Mulligan is preoccupied only with keeping his party from degenerating completely. Callisto spends his time dictating his memoirs to Aubade, his girlfriend, and his memoirs give this story a sense of historical background and context. This background is not, however, a solid or a stabilizing one, for either the reader or for Callisto himself. Callisto’s European memories are of “the war” (93)—that is, World War I—and are as fragmented, swirling, and chaotic as is Meatball’s party downstairs. Callisto is also preoccupied with the concept of entropy, which he sees as both an immediate threat and a threat to his understanding of his past: “He was forced, therefore […] to a radical reevaluation of everything he had learned up to then: all the cities and seasons and casual passions of his days had now to be looked at in a new and elusive light” (87).
Both Meatball and Callisto are stranded in different ways, their apartments self-contained worlds which they never have to leave. Meatball’s chaotic apartment party is a mimesis of the chaotic world outside, while Callisto’s greenhouse sanctuary is a conscious rejection of this world. Callisto’s awareness and deliberateness, however, puts him dangerously out of step with his times, and this awareness finally leads to a violent confrontation with the world that he has been trying to hold at bay.
Aubade
Aubade, Callisto’s alluring and enigmatic girlfriend, is described at one point in the story as “a tawny question mark” (84). As a character, she is a kind of bridge between Callisto and Meatball. She is foreign, like Callisto—half-French and half-Annamese—but like Meatball, she seems to lack Callisto’s culture and education. She is reduced to taking on his concerns without exactly understanding the import of these concerns, as well as to writing down his memoirs as if they are her own. While Callisto wrestles with the concept of entropy intellectually, Aubade feels this concept intuitively, in her body, and she is at once exposed and isolated in a way that the men in this story are not:
[S]he lived on her own curious and lonely planet, where the clouds and odor of poincianas, the bitterness of wine and the accidental fingers at the small of her back […] came to her reduced inevitably to the terms of sound: of music which emerged at intervals from a howling darkness of discordancy (84).
Aubade is unable to construct a durable shelter against this darkness, as both Callisto and Meatball at least attempt to do. She is instead her own precarious moving shelter:
The architectonic purity of her world was constantly threatened by such hints of anarchy […] a shifting or tilting of planes to which she had continually to readjust lest the whole structure shiver into a disarray of discrete and meaningless signals (88).
This constant readjustment is finally too exhausting of an effort for her, as is seen by her smashing her hands through Callisto’s apartment window. While this is obviously a nihilistic and self-destructive gesture, it is also an effort to connect with the outside world: one that neither Callisto nor Meatball make, or need to make.
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