Driblette’s Suicide

Randolph Driblette’s suicide is disclosed at his wake: he walked into the Pacific two nights earlier, still wearing his Gennaro suit. His death removes Oedipa’s most promising guide to The Courier’s Tragedy and its Tristero clues, but neither the timing nor his unexplained alteration of the play supplies a definitive motive. The loss deepens the novel’s uncertainty, turning an apparent source of interpretation into another absence that Oedipa cannot decipher.

Announcement and Circumstances

Oedipa hears of the death while asking whether the production she saw at the Tank Theatre had been pornographic. Emory Bortz instead recalls Randolph Driblette’s staging as “typically virtuous,” describing Driblette as a peculiarly moral man who felt little responsibility toward the play’s words but remained intensely faithful to its invisible field, its spirit. Bortz considers him uniquely close to the historical Wharfinger and to the microcosm that might have surrounded the playwright’s mind. This account establishes the particular authority Driblette held for Oedipa: he was not merely the director of a production, but the person Bortz believed best able to summon the work’s vanished world.

When Oedipa notices that Bortz is speaking of Driblette in the past tense, the people around her look at her. A girl finally explains that Driblette walked into the Pacific two nights earlier, wearing his Gennaro suit; the gathering is a wake. The news lands against Oedipa’s recollection that she tried to call him that very morning. Her ordinary next question would once have been why he died, but she now keeps silent, waiting as though the answer might arrive through illumination rather than inquiry.

Timing and the Unanswered Motive

Bortz places the suicide after the company struck the set of The Courier’s Tragedy. That chronology links Driblette’s death to the end of the production without proving that the play’s closing or its subject caused it. Oedipa had wanted to ask him about the script, including whether he had used only the paperback as his source. His death forecloses the direct conversation she hoped would clarify the lines he inserted into the performance.

The insertion remains as opaque as the suicide. Oedipa later wonders whether Driblette knew why he had added the two lines, and concludes that no one could begin to trace the answer. She considers sex, money, illness, despair, and the history of his time and place among the possible pressures, but does not establish any one as decisive. The narrative’s refusal to settle on a motive makes the death an unresolved event rather than a puzzle with a recoverable solution: changing the script and ending his life appear to Oedipa to share a whimsy she cannot interpret.

Oedipa’s Experience of the Loss

At the wake, Oedipa experiences Driblette’s death as part of a growing sequence of separations. In her private reckoning, her doctor has gone mad, her husband is withdrawing into an LSD-distorted interior world, Metzger has eloped with a fifteen-year-old, and her best guide back to the Tristero is gone. Her question about where she now stands does not identify a new destination; it exposes the loss of the people through whom she had tried to understand her life and investigation.

The news does not simply take away a source of information. Driblette’s earlier account of fidelity to a play’s spirit had made him seem capable of reaching beyond its printed words, and therefore potentially able to explain how the Tristero material entered the performance. With him dead, the distinction between the text, its staging, and the intention behind it becomes harder for Oedipa to resolve. His importance lies partly in that lost possibility: he might have helped her interpret the clues, but his death leaves the interpretive work to her.

Burial and Aftermath

The day after reading Dr. Diocletian Blobb’s Peregrinations, Oedipa attends Driblette’s burial with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students. She listens to Driblette’s younger brother deliver a helpless, stricken eulogy and watches his mother cry through the afternoon smog. Later, she returns to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, a wine Driblette had stored by the barrel. The burial thus gives the disappearance a concrete communal aftermath—family grief, a grave, and a gathering—without making the death’s cause any more knowable.

At night, with no moon and the stars hidden by smog, Oedipa sits on the earth and wonders whether some version of herself has vanished with Driblette. She compares the possibility to an amputee’s phantom limb: a mind might keep flexing powers that no longer exist, deceived by the felt presence of what has been lost. She imagines that she may replace the missing part of herself with a prosthesis—a particular dress, a phrase in a letter, or another lover—but this remains speculation, not a recovery of what Driblette’s death has taken from her.

Her thoughts turn toward the possibility that some memory might persist beneath the ground. She longs especially for a memory of Driblette’s final night, or at least his last five minutes, because it might tell her whether his walk into the sea had anything to do with the Tristero. She also wonders whether he was removed for the same reason she imagines others have been removed from her life, but offers no evidence that anyone caused his death. The hope that his memory might return is an expression of grief and suspicion, not confirmation of a conspiracy.

Significance in the Investigation

Driblette’s death interrupts Oedipa’s attempt to trace the Tristero through the performance of The Courier’s Tragedy. The timing after the set was struck, the two added lines, and her unanswered question about Driblette’s sources invite a connection, but the novel leaves that connection unverified. Oedipa’s fear that his death might be linked to the fate of Hilarius, Mucho, and Metzger shows how her investigation and her personal losses have begun to merge; it does not establish a common agent or cause.

The event also sharpens a conflict between interpretive authority and interpretive absence. Bortz remembers Driblette as unusually faithful to the spirit of the play, yet that very authority cannot survive long enough to explain what he did with it. The person who might have mediated between Wharfinger’s text and the Tristero mystery becomes inaccessible, while Oedipa is left with a performance, a changed script, and possible explanations that cannot be tested. His suicide therefore contributes to the novel’s larger uncertainty: clues may accumulate, but the loss of their human interpreters prevents accumulation from becoming proof.