Meatball and Callisto: Two responses to entropy

Extract

[...] At the first of two climaxes in the story, he surveys the chaos and thinks of the ways he could cope: lock himself in the closet and maybe eventually they would all go away, or try to calm everybody down, one by one.” His decision to calm his guests is indicative of his willingness to engage others. Rather than give up, he imposes order on the disintegrating party. Callisto, on the other hand, accepts the onslaught of entropy. He sees himself the sad dying fall of middle looking back at his early life and describing the moment he realized that entropy was real, vision of ultimate, cosmic heat-death” (2526). [...]

[...] Meatball and Callisto: Two responses to entropy Pynchon's “Entropy” begins at a party that has lasted 40 hours. Everyone knows parties don't last that long or at least, they shouldn't. Meatball's party has continued far too long and is about to disintegrate. This deterioration is linked explicitly to the law of entropy, which is the gradual, inevitable slowing down of the universe. In Callisto's words, “nothing but a theoretical engine or system runs at 100% efficiency” (2526). Additionally, entropy states that any system will become more inefficient with the passage of time. [...]

[...] He lets his personal discovery of entropy color everything, taking 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” (2526). Although he could not know when the final throes of entropy would be reached, Callisto applied the principle directly to himself. This self-referencing ultimately leads him into depression and a hermit-like existence. There is no room for the individual. [...]