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The Inamorati Anonymous Member
The sailor is an elderly alcoholic man with the Tristero horn symbol tattooed on his arm, whom Oedipa meets in San Francisco. He asks Oedipa to send a letter to his estranged wife via W.A.S.T.E., and then Oedipa helps him return upstairs to his room, where she helps him cope with delirium tremens hallucinations and contemplates all the memories that his mattress contains, at least symbolically. Although the old sailor is out of touch with reality, to Oedipa, he represents what Jesús Arrabal called a miracle: a brief meeting of two worlds that opens the possibility of change in each of them. Indeed, he leads her directly to direct proof that the W.A.S.T.E. mail system exists, and he gives life to Oedipa’s hope that uncovering Tristero will help her escape the sense of alienation that dominates her life.
The Sailor Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49
The The Crying of Lot 49 quotes below are all either spoken by The Sailor or refer to The Sailor. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 5
Quotes
She remembered John Nefastis, talking about his Machine, and massive destructions of information. So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking’s funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned. She stared at it in wonder. It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of.
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The Sailor Character Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49
The timeline below shows where the character The Sailor appears in The Crying of Lot 49. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 5
...the sheer quantity of clues and the popularity of W.A.S.T.E. Downtown, she sees an elderly sailor with the symbol tattooed on his hand crying inside a building. She approaches him, and...
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Oedipa gives the sailor $10, but he complains that he’ll spend it on alcohol. He asks for a cigarette,...
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Oedipa runs outside and finds the bridge that the sailor told her to seek out. Once she arrives, it takes her an hour to find...
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