N.A.D.A is an acronym for the National Automobile Dealers' Association and it is just one of the many acronyms Oedipa encounters throughout the novel. This particular one is presented when Mucho and Oedipa are talking about his reoccurring nightmare at the car lot. He just keeps seeing the initials, nada, which in Spanish means nothing. But it is just one of the nothings that Oedipa finds on her mini journey away from San Narciso.
Then there is the one that constantly hangs over Oedipa's head, which in Chapter 5 she still has no idea what the initials represent. WASTE. She first found this acronym on the stall wall at The Scope. Interesting, a scope, which is used to see things far away, close up, and yet she still has not been able to recover the meaning of WASTE. In fact it seems that The Scope just provides her with more of a mystery, than giving her more information. Or maybe it is a play on words, as in "widening her scope" or giving her a bigger perspective on life which she has not been able to find elsewhere.
LSD, KCUF, DEATH, FSM, YAF, VDC, IA, CIA, AC-DC, TWA. Pynchon's novel is so full of initials it can make ones head spin, and if fact, it drives Oedipa half crazy; driving her back to Kinneret to see her shrink. It seems that Pynchon was fond of acronyms, and embedded them in his novel. Poor Oedipa, if I was caught in this onslaught on initials I would probably go nuts too. But many Pynchon is trying to tell us something, perhaps, only that things have meaning if we force it on them, or else it's just a bunch of mixed up letters which no one is able to understand.
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