Bones Symbol Analysis

Since bones are often regarded as the sacred remains left behind by past generations, their conversion into consumer goods in The Crying of Lot 49 represents how capitalism cheapens and defaces the human experience. Oedipa first catches wind of the Tristero conspiracy when, in a bizarre coincidence, she twice hears the same story about soldiers’ bones being thrown in a lake, then dug up to be used as raw materials in manufacturing. The first time, the mafioso Tony Jaguar digs up the bones of American World War II soldiers from the Lago di Pietà in Italy to make special bone charcoal filters for Pierce Inverarity’s Beaconsfield cigarettes. The second time, in fictional 17th-century English playwright Richard Wharfinger’s work The Courier’s Tragedy, the evil Duke of Squamuglia, Angelo, also dumps his rivals’ bones in an Italian lake and then digs them up, this time to make the ink that he uses to write a confession of his crimes. In both cases, bones are turned into a junk commodity—they are neither a necessary ingredient nor a clearly useful one in either cigarettes or ink. Rather, they are mixed in for shock value, as though the precious histories and memories of the deceased could somehow be captured by turning their bones into consumer goods. In reality, of course, the effect is the opposite: turning bones into cigarettes is vulgar and disrespectful, emblemizing the idea that capitalists like Pierce Inverarity value nothing besides money and end up corrupting society as a result.