All 3 Uses of
abyss
in
The Crying of Lot 49
- Oedipa found herself after five minutes sucked utterly into the landscape of evil Richard Wharfinger had fashioned for his 17th-century audiences, so preapocalyptic, death-wishful, sensually fatigued, unprepared, a little poignantly, for that abyss of civil war that had been waiting, cold and deep, only a few years ahead of them.†
Chpt 3 *abyss = a hole or dropoff so deep the bottom cannot be seen -- often used figuratively to imply a frightening bottomless pit
- They are stripping from me, she said subvocally—feeling like a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out over the abyss—they are stripping away, one by one, my men.†
Chpt 6
- Again with the light, vertiginous sense of fluttering out over an abyss, she asked what she'd come there to ask.†
Chpt 6