Entropy

While the characters in “Entropy” seem isolated from the outside world, this world nevertheless looms large in their concerns and in their conversation. In particular, the specter of war and violence seems in different ways to haunt both Meatball and Callisto, giving their isolation an aspect of paranoia. It is significant that the story is set in Washington, DC, and that Meatball and Callisto have a parasitic, defensive relation to their surroundings. They live in the city but are apart from its inner workings. Meatball belongs to a community of disaffected “American expatriates” (82) who are merely killing time in the city until they are able to find a permanent post in Europe; Callisto, in turn, is an exiled European, for reasons that we never learn. Both characters, then, are in limbo, even while they are also right in the hub of American power.

In his introduction to Slow Learner—the collection of early stories in which this story appears—Pynchon states:

[The threat of nuclear bombs] was bad enough in ’59 and is much worse now […] I think we all have tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy about it (18-19). 

He is referring here not to “Entropy” but to “Under the Rose,” another, later story in the collection. Nevertheless, both Meatball and Callisto are attempting, in their different ways, to manage this “helplessness and terror” (19). Meatball’s style of coping is to make mordant, flippant jokes and to make a general preemptive show of giving up and doing the bare minimum. He does not even attempt to control the flow of guests in and out of his own apartment, and at the end of the story does not so much restore order to his party as “keep [it] from deteriorating into total chaos” (97). He displays this same jaunty fatalism when talking about ominous global tendencies, as he does with his distraught friend Saul. Saul has just had a fight with his wife that was, he tells Meatball, about “communication theory” (89). He muses to Meatball about the constant threat of government surveillance and the possibility of humans being analyzed like computers, to which Meatball responds, “Why not?” (90).  

Callisto is a generation older than Meatball, and he has grown up witnessing the breakdown of world order and the rising threat of nuclear power that to Meatball and his contemporaries is a simple fact of life. Sequestered in his apartment, he broods over the gathering possibility of “heat-death” (88), while remembering the destruction of World War I. On the surface, this “heat-death” is another sort of communication theory, referring to the breakdown of communication that Callisto sees as indicative of entropy:

[He] envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease (88-89).

Yet the term “heat-death” suggests nuclear destruction as well, of the sort that a pair of guests at Meatball’s party refers to directly, though offhandedly. A man tells a woman about a jazz pianist who was injured as an army private while handling radiation, explaining that it had “[s]omething to do with the Manhattan Project” (92). She replies to him, “What an awful break for a piano player” (92).