I thought one very interesting aspect of this novel was the way all the characters seem to fall apart together. We see Oedipa slip deeper and deeper into the Tristero conspiracy, especially in Chapter 5 when she drives to San Francisco and spends a full 24 hours just wandering around looking for the horn symbol and other symbols, which turn out to be oddly quite abundant. After this trip, when she decided to visit her therapist Dr. Hilarius, she is surprised to find that he has gone crazy, and that he has holed himself up in his office with a rifle claiming that Jewish people are coming to get him and punish him. We don’t know much about Dr. Hilarius, but it seems that his secret identity of Nazi experimenter has come bursting out of him, destroying the character that we and Oedipa knew.

We also see an unravelling of Mucho. He literally is a different person (or many people) because of the LSD that Dr. Hilarius gave him. He is now so unlike the man that Oedipa knew and married that she feels scares. Another character that unravels is Metzger, when he runs away with Serge’s girlfriend, which Oedipa finds out right after going back to San Narciso. She also learns that Driblette has committed suicide. It’s like Oedipa’s whole world and the deepest relationships that she has are unraveling as she does.