How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"I don't know what's inside them." (1.25)
Why doesn't Oedipa trust Hilarius or his drugs? If she had taken them, how might it change your perception of what is real and what is not? Why are so many men trying to drug Oedipa?
Quote #2
"We still need a hundred-and-fourth for the bridge." Chuckled aridly. The bridge, die Brucke, being his pet name for the experiment he was helping the community hospital run on effects of LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin, and related drugs on a large sample of suburban housewives. The bridge inward. (1.28)
How is this a real reflection of what was going on in the 1960s? How crazy is it that Oedipa's therapist is trying to talk her into doing LSD?
Quote #3
What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. (2.4)
What does a highway entering a city have in common with a vein being shot up with drugs to keep the individual happy? Why do you think Oedipa is drawn to this drug imagery?
Quote #4
"Another bottle tonight would put you to sleep. No." (2.65)
What does this reveal about how Metzger is using alcohol? Why do you think Oedipa goes along with it?
Quote #5
The time in between had been whiled away with songs by the Paranoids, and juicing, and feeding pieces of eggplant sandwich to a flock of not too bright seagulls who'd mistaken Fangoso Langoons for the Pacific, and hearing the plot of The Courier's Tragedy, by Richard Wharfinger, related near to unintelligible by eight memories unlooping progressively into regions as strange to map as their rising coils and clouds of pot smoke. (3.113)
How does the shape of this sentence capture the confusion Oedipa feels at listening to the narrator's pot-affected narration of The Courier's Tragedy?
Quote #6
At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. (5.79)
How does the fact that Oedipa is drunk for much of her night in San Francisco affect how you perceive events? Explain the illusion she senses that her drunkenness will protect her? Does that explain why she got drunk in the first place?
Quote #7
"You know, with the LSD, we're finding, the distinction begins to vanish. Egos lose their sharp edges." (5.165)
Considering his own predicament, why do you think Hilarius might be so interested in LSD if this is really its effect?
Quote #8
"Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic. He enters a staff meeting and the room is suddenly full of people, you know? He's a walking assembly of man." (6.202)
Does this seem to contradict the popular notion that doing drugs somehow makes one unique? That it is a way to rebel? What do you make of the fact that it actually makes Wendell more generic?
Quote #9
"You don't get addicted. It's not like you're some hophead. You take it because it's good. Because you hear and see things, even smell them, taste like you never could. Because the world is so abundant. No end to it, baby. You're an antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives a night, and they're your lives too." (6.320)
Does it seem to you that drugs have made Wendell happy? If so, what is wrong with the fact that he takes them?