Manny is an acquaintance of Metzger’s who portrays Metzger on a failed TV pilot. While Metzger started out as a child actor and later became a lawyer, Di Presso started as a lawyer, briefly tried his hand at acting, and then went back to law. In fact, he is a lawyer for the mafia, and he is running from the mafioso Tony Jaguar when Oedipa, Metzger, and the Paranoids encounter him in a scuba suit in Fangoso Lagoons. He explains that he is investigating the bones at the bottom of Fangoso Lagoons’s lake for a case against Pierce Inverarity’s estate. Supposedly, when Tony Jaguar dug these bones out of the Lago di Pietà in Italy and sold them to the Beaconsfield cigarette company, Beaconsfield never paid him. A caricature of a fast-talking mob lawyer, Di Presso serves as a character foil to point out Metzger’s own moral shortcomings.
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Manny Di Presso Character Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49
The timeline below shows where the character Manny Di Presso appears in The Crying of Lot 49. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...tequila and tells Oedipa that being a lawyer and being an actor are really similar. Manny Di Presso , a former lawyer who became an actor, is even playing Metzger on a television...
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Chapter 3
Manny Di Presso , the lawyer-turned-actor who works with Metzger, suddenly jumps out from under a tarp and...
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...have to dig up cemeteries to build highways like the East San Narciso Freeway, but Di Presso explains that the bones were really from the Lago di Pietà in Italy, where there...
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...story about the bones reminds them of The Courier’s Tragedy, a play they saw recently. Di Presso freaks out because he didn’t think the Paranoids were listening to his conversation, and then...
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