The chapter opens with Oedipa descending into the Tristero conspiracy, “until everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero.” This is probably the strongest confirmation yet that much if not most of the aspects of the conspiracy are a function of Oedipa’s psychology — she may be imagining the whole thing, or she may be making more out of a series of disconnected facts or coincidences.
During her self-guided tour of Yoyodyne, Oedipa encounters Stanley Koteks, who encourages her as a stockholder to get the company to rescind its policies against permitting its engineers to patent their inventions. She reacts by saying “I didn’t think people invented any more.” This is an interesting facet to one of the novel’s theme of knowability/unknowability — in the modern era, the notion of invention seems entirely ceded to corporate teams and for a variety of reasons individual inventors such as Leonardo di Vinci and Edison are no longer in evidence. Of course the notion that no one invents anything is absurd, but the notion of the everywoman being disconnected from the source of new knowledge (and the control of that knowledge) is a central element of the story.
American Lit Journal 