The Title

 Mason & Dixon

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That's the title! Not much to analyze, is there? It's just the goofy names of two old dead guys. If you were a person unfamiliar with Thomas Pynchon, you might pick up this book thinking it was going to be a historical biography. At worst, you might think it's historical fiction about the two, maybe even an imaginary romance. But if you're familiar with Pynchon, you know this book is going to have a ton of information about Mason and Dixon and how they did the things they did and where they traveled during the exact years they actually traveled there while also dropping some heavy scientific and historical knowledge on you. But you also know it'll be wrapped up in mythical beasts and paranoid conspiracies and throbbing boners and singing & dancing animals and dream-like hallucinations that may or may not be linear parts of the plot.

But those are things the author's name suggests! The title, Mason & Dixon, suggests, first and foremost, boundaries. After that, you might consider what the Mason-Dixon line was most famous for and that was separating the free Northern United States and the slave-owning Southern bastards. So now the title almost instantly suggests the divide between the races as well.

But mostly it suggests borders which means I should probably bone up on the definition of "liminal." I should do that anyway so that I stop using it incorrectly because I love using it but I don't really know when I should use it. There's probably something liminal with my understanding of it, right? No? Maybe?!

Charles Mason was an astronomer and Jeremiah Dixon was a surveyor (and also amateur astronomer). That's about all the research I want to do on them because I don't want to spoil the book! I mean, I've read it before but it's been over 20 years!