She is able to perceive that sorting between the poles of a dichotomy is not a cut and dry process, touching on the theme of excluded middles. Oedipa's continuing need to encounter more of Pierce's property leads her to the nursing home where she meets Mr. Thoth. The name Thoth is an allusion to the idea of hieroglyphics and encoded ancient processes. Further stretching Pynchon's elusive, though thematic, postmodern metametaphor for the significance of language, Thoth starts immediately into a mode of storytelling which is little preserved in the modern world but slips occasionally into a Porky Pig cartoon and is unable to distinguish between the reality of each. Yet the non-Indian marauders clothed in black mentioned in the story directly parallel the henchmen in Driblette's production and the dark riders who disrupted the Wells, Fargo men of the Fangoso Lagoons marker.
History is at once confused with metaphor and fiction and language.
The last character Oedipa encounters in the chapter is the philatelist, Genghis Cohen. Pynchon has admitted publicly that Cohen's name was simply a pun for the Mongol warrior, Genghis Khan. It appears that he did not mean for the reader to look into why this specific character was named after the warrior, perhaps only for the irony of a character who seems rather meek garnering such an allusion. However, Cohen does bring Oedipa to a new frontier of her search by supplying her with solid evidence. First, he offers her dandelion wine which symbolically parallels the bones which were dug up by Pierce as he cleared graveyards for a freeway.