In a stylish way, Pynchon displays his disfavor for his story in the introduction to Slow Learner. Pynchon criticizes himself quite rudely, declaring that the work seems to have grown from the hope to "commit on paper a variety of abuses, such as overwriting." He even claims that the work is an instance of a young writer’s wrong action of forcing a theme onto the characters rather than having the theme develop through the characters, that his focus on the concept finally led him to "shortchange the humans in the story.” These words of wisdom are given by Pynchon for the upcoming writers "Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page."
In reality, much of what Pynchon has to say in the introduction part regarding this specific short story is in the form of proposal to anyone who think on writing short stories in their future. As though the publishing of "Entropy" was a kind of public service to people in danger of writing similar-level fiction, Pynchon tells us what he does about this story "only on the chance that others may derive gain from my error." Particularly, he gives ‘lectures’ for readers to learn from his past errors, like: "corroborate one’s data, in particular those acquired casually, such as through hearsay or the back of record albums." Pynchon goes on by citing special errors of this kind present in the text of the story as instances of what should not be done. Pynchon also takes the old adage "Write what you know" and postulate an addition to the advice: "So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance and the possibilities therein for ruining a good story."
In his talk about this story, Pynchon shows much care in attempting to explain the importance of the impression of entropy as he opt to portray it in his short story as well as his overall opinion on the scenario. He asks the readers to research on the subject and try a comprehension of it on their own, for, like Callisto, Pynchon seems to find quite firmly that entropy is a concept applicable in a metaphorical manner to several modes of everyday life.
Pynchon gives credit of his greater influences in the formation of "Entropy" to Henry Adams and Norbert Wiener, authors of ‘Cybernetics’ and the ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ respectively. He even says "that the `theme’ of the story is mostly derived from the sayings of these two authors.
Analysis:
