Named after the Egyptian god of scribes, Mr. Thoth is an old man who lives at Vesperhaven House, a San Narciso retirement home owned by Pierce Inverarity. While visiting all of Inverarity’s companies and properties, Oedipa runs into Thoth by chance, and Thoth tells her a story about his racist frontiersman grandfather, a Pony Express mail-carrier, delightfully slaughtering a group of bandits with “a Mexican name” and stealing a gold ring with the muted post horn symbol on it. Oedipa assumes that this group must be Tristero, and Thoth’s explanation is consistent with Professor Bortz’s suggestion that the members of Tristero immigrated to the United States in 1849 and continued carrying mail while disguising themselves as Mexicans and Native Americans in the American West. However, Oedipa never decides whether or not to believe this story.
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Mr. Thoth Character Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49
The timeline below shows where the character Mr. Thoth appears in The Crying of Lot 49. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4
...that he built. Inside, a nurse viciously pursues a fly, and an elderly man named Mr. Thoth tells Oedipa about his grandfather, a mail courier on the Pony Express who loved murdering...
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Chapter 6
...gradually gives up on the Tristero story. She does not follow up with Genghis Cohen, Mr. Thoth , or the publisher of The Courier’s Tragedy. She also tries not to talk about...
(full context)
