T. S. Eliot said that the individual literary talent both assimilates and modifies the literary tradition, and Pynchon does not violate this dictum. He assimilates and modifies both the "modern" tradition and the more venerable quest tradition, and he owes much to the document in which the one was sired on the other -- Eliot The Waste Land. Where the quest in Eliot's poem was highly ambiguous, the quests in Pynchon's books are conceded from the outset to be factitious and unresolvable. The quest was hard enough in the old literature, because only certain preternaturally pure knights could even come close to the ideal. Now it is harder yet, since we have lost not merely the object which an omnipotent being has endowed with special powers of spiritual healing, but also the very ground of certainty, the indispensable faith that made all kinds of quests worthwhile -- and made reading about them edifying.