While the characters in “Entropy” seem isolated from the outside world, this world nevertheless looms large in their concerns and in their conversation. In particular, the specter of war and violence seems in different ways to haunt both Meatball and Callisto, giving their isolation an aspect of paranoia. It is significant that the story is set in Washington, DC, and that Meatball and Callisto have a parasitic, defensive relation to their surroundings. They live in the city but are apart from its inner workings. Meatball belongs to a community of disaffected “American expatriates” (82) who are merely killing time in the city until they are able to find a permanent post in Europe; Callisto, in turn, is an exiled European, for reasons that we never learn. Both characters, then, are in limbo, even while they are also right in the hub of American power.

In his introduction to Slow Learner—the collection of early stories in which this story appears—Pynchon states:

[The threat of nuclear bombs] was bad enough in ’59 and is much worse now […] I think we all have tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy about it (18-19).