Lot 49

It'd be hard for Thomas Pynchon to have ended The Crying of Lot 49 in a more ambiguous way. He leaves Oedipa at an auction, waiting to identify an important person she knows as a "mysterious client" who wants to bid on part of Pierce's stamp collection. But she doesn't actually know for sure if he will even be there in person, whether he will actually bid, or even what she will do if he does bid: "She had only some vague idea about causing a scene violent enough to bring the cops into it and find out that way who the man really was," she thinks to herself in the last chapter. She still has doubts about whether the whole Tristero conspiracy actually exists, and isn't even sure whether she has mental problems of some kind. There's nothing for the reader to even really grab onto, no real concrete information other than just hints, clues, and hunches.

Oedipa at this point is almost as hesitant about everything as are we as we follow along her story. Besides second guessing herself about what she'll even do if everything goes according to plan, she's skeptical of many other things in her surroundings and jumps to conclusions (or at least more hunches) about what she sees around her. She describes the men in the auction room as having "cruel faces" and "trying each to conceal his thoughts," while she decides in a single glance that the auctioneer is some kind of controlling puppeteer and draws several conclusions about him. Oedipa, despite obviously having much to lose from the situation and her lengthy investigation of Tristero, indulges in all kinds of wandering thoughts.

The story ends just before Oedipa expects to find out some real, concrete information and should lead to a much better understanding of the whole affair, but Pynchon could just have easily stopped the novel before any of the other epiphanies concerning Tristero that she's experienced. The only clear conclusion to make is that this isn't near the end of Oedipa's story; if it was, he would have gone on and shown the truth and concluded the novel. It seems like it'll just keep on going, which means that the author intends for Oedipa never to really understand the truth and be able to explain the mystery.