I herby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself. I used only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography
MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature The Role of Solitude in Paul Auster’s Prose Bachelor Thesis Brno 2008 Author: Richard Tetek Supervisor: Mgr Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D I herby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself I used only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography Brno, 15 April 2008 Richard Tetek Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mgr Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D., for her patience, kind guidance and worthy advice Contents Introduction 0.1 Paul Auster’s Biography The Invention of Solitude 1.1 Portrait of an Invisible Man 1.2 The Book of Memory 15 22 The New York Trilogy 2.1 City of Glass 23 2.2 Ghosts 30 2.3 The Locked Room 34 Conclusion 39 Resume 41 Bibliography 42 Appendix 46 Introduction The aim of this thesis is to analyse Paul Auster’s prose in connection with the theme of solitude I have chosen two of his books, namely The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy, because they provide a wide range of views on the topic The two books deal with similar questions and they both reflect Auster’s opinions on the role of solitude in our lives For most people the word solitude often carries mostly negative connotations It is connected with other expressions such as loneliness, friendlessness or isolation It is generally seen as something undesirable and unwanted Nevertheless, there inevitably are moments when we are alone Moreover, it is possible to find many examples of important figures throughout history who relished aloneness I have decided to choose Paul Auster’s books because they focus on contemporary problems of our lives in an original way The theme of solitude, which is often connected with the quest for one’s identity, is paramount in Auster’s work, and it is one of the key issues he tries to explore The purpose of this paper will be to examine Auster’s views on the role of solitude in postmodern world and to identify what the term means for him I will analyse each book separately because they both approach the topic from a different perspective I will also try to decide whether they have something in common Finally, I would like to find out whether Auster’s understanding of solitude is more negative or positive I will describe possible advantages and disadvantages of aloneness in accordance with the both books Because Paul Auster’s prose often draws on autobiographical material, I will include a brief biography and also a short introduction to each book in order to provide useful background for understanding Auster’s work 0.1 Paul Auster’s biography Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947 in Newark, New Jersey His parents Samuel and Queenie Auster were middle class Jews of Polish decent However, their marriage was unhappy and they later divorced In 1960 Auster’s uncle, who worked as a translator, left several boxes full of books in Auster’s house in storage Young Auster started to read them and it developed his interest in literature and writing When his parents separated, Auster lived with his mothers and younger sister, who suffered from mental breakdowns After finishing high school, Auster went on to study literature at Columbia University, where he began his relationship with Lydia Davis Auster graduated in 1970 and started to work as a utility man on an oil tanker Between 1970 and 1974, Auster lived in France, where he tried to support himself with various translations and other occasional jobs (Kreutzer) After his return to the USA, he married Lydia and the couple settled in New York, where their son Daniel was born in 1977 Auster was translating French poetry and some of his poems and essays were published However, the family had serious financial difficulties and the marriage was gradually disintegrating Auster also tried to write several plays but they were unsuccessful Desperate to earn money, Auster even wrote a private-eye thriller under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin or invented a card game In spite of all those attempts, his financial situation did not change for the better In 1979, Auster’s father died and Auster inherited enough money to pursue his literary career Meanwhile, his marriage with Lydia collapsed They decided to live separately and later divorced It was at that time, when Auster started to work on The Invention of Solitude (Kreutzer) In 1981, Auster met Siri Hustvedt, also a writer, and the two got married in the same year Soon, their daughter Sophie was born Things started to improve considerably for Auster Moreover, after publishing his next work, The New York Trilogy, he became popular worldwide Nowadays, Auster is considered to be “one of the foremost American novelists now writing” (Sim 186) Paul Auster has published eleven novels, several books of poetry, many essays and translations He has also written a number of screenplays, for example for films like Smoke, Lulu on the Bridge or The Inner Life of Martin Frost He is usually classified as a postmodern author (Sim 123) Auster often uses features of various genres like, for instance, detective or picaresque novels to explore themes which are typical of his writing Most of his books contain aspects of the author’s own life or references to other literature and they can be described as metafictional, where many of his characters are involved in a certain kind of writing or are writers themselves (Barone 5) Intertextuality, fragmentation or vicious circles where the author himself enters the book, are some other techniques present in his work Search for identity, coincides, contingency of language, solitude or ambiguity of reality are the key topics of his prose (Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia) Paul Auster still lives and works in Brooklyn, New York The Invention of Solitude The Invention of Solitude is Auster’s first published prose book Although it has many autobiographical features, it is not a typical autobiography Its aim is not just to describe Auster’s life but, more importantly, to put forward some universal questions Auster himself refuses to consider it as his autobiography and describes it as “a meditation about certain questions, using myself as the central character” (Auster, The Red Notebook 106) It is divided into two sections The first one is called Portrait of an Invisible Man and the second one The Book of Memory The two parts were originally written as two separate books, with a gap of about a year between them Nevertheless, they were published together under the name The Invention of Solitude in 1982 Auster started to write Portrait of an Invisible Man as a spontaneous reaction to his father’s sudden death It is written in the first person and it explores, among other things, the question of solipsism; whether, and to what extent, it is possible to understand other people’s feelings and emotions, whether we can penetrate someone else’s solitude The Book of Memory was a direct response to the first part It is a confessional collage of thoughts, memories, quotations and meditation upon topics like fatherhood, identity and the sense of life, written in the third person It also tries to define what our solitude means for us and what our self consists of The Invention of Solitude was the first Auster’s book attracting wider public attention and it opened the gate for his later literary career The reviews were mostly positive, although some were complaining that especially the second part is marred by “recurrent pointless mannerism” (Merwin) Others pointed out that the abundance of allusions and references is a sign of Auster’s immaturity as a writer, and that the high number of quotes may put off the reader who is not familiar with them (Hamilton) The book, however, introduced the themes and topics that would later appear in most of his books and are crucial for his literary work: “The Invention of Solitude is both the ars poetica and the seminal work of Paul Auster To understand him we must start here; all his books lead us back to this one” (Bruckner 27) It also implies that mixing the real, autobiographical features with the fictional will become one of the trademarks of his prose The book is also important for understanding Auster’s views on solitude 1.1 Portrait of an Invisible Man The death of his father comes as a big surprise for Auster Even though their mutual relationship could be described as cold and distant, Auster feels the need to explore it deeper after his father dies He decides to achieve it through writing a memoir: “I thought: my father is gone If I not act quickly, his entire life will vanish along with him” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 6) This implies that Auster sees their relationship as unresolved Putting ideas on paper is a way of solving the problem He failed to so while his father was alive and he feels he must it now From Auster’s point of view, his father was an unapproachable, withdrawn kind of person On the surface, he had led a normal, sociable life but inside he stayed cold, without a real passion for anything around him This must have had a negative impact on his family because he was unable to express any passionate emotions of love for them: “He did not seem to be a man occupying space, but rather a block of impenetrable space in the form of a man” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 7) He had lived in his own solitary world, absent and closed even for the people closest to him In this sense, his existence seemed empty and invisible After receiving a phone call informing him about his father’s death, Auster comes to the old, solidly built house where his father had lived alone for fifteen years He finds going through his father’s things both terrible and fascinating The objects he comes across give him the illusion that his father is still there Only after he throws away his father’s ties, does he accept the fact that his father is dead What Auster tries to is to give his feelings some form, to organize them through writing them down He attempts to rediscover and reassess his relationship with his father Auster sees his father’s restrained behaviour as something negative and harmful He understands it as an attempt to hide from both himself and the world around him (Barbour 186) His father solitude and remoteness has no positive aspect for Auster: Solitary But not in the sense being alone Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale Solitary in the sense of retreat In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 17) There is no doubt that Auster suffered because his father was not able to show any emotions or passion towards his son According to Auster, the marriage of his parents was not the happy one from the very beginning His mother was already on the verge of leaving his father during their honeymoon Auster imagines his own conception as a result of “a passionless embrace, blind, dutiful groping between chilly hotel sheets” He even goes that far to call himself “a random homunculus” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 19) Eight months later when the baby was coming, his father refused to go to hospital with his wife and went to work She had to be taken to hospital and cared for by her sister He came only for a short visit to see his newborn son and went to work again Auster’s early memories of his father are those of his absence Even when he did not work and stayed with his family, his father still seemed somehow distracted and absentminded Auster explains that it was impossible for him to understand his father He could not get close to him; he was not able to penetrate through the emotional vacuum surrounding him As he puts it: “Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 20) Unfortunately for his son, the father seemed not able or willing to reveal what his real feelings were He never spoke about his emotions and refused to look into himself, as if his inner life was something elusive even for him Instead, he hid himself behind clichés and fixed routines Auster compares the state of his father’s inner world to the state of the house where his father had lived Since his wife had divorced him, his father occupied the enormous house all by himself for fifteen years until his sudden death He changed almost nothing since the rest of the family had left Auster noticed that: “Although he kept the house tidy and preserved it more or less as it had been, it underwent a gradual and ineluctable process of disintegration He was neat, he always put things back in their proper place, but nothing was cared for, nothing was ever cleaned” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 9) The house reminded of a place occupied by a stranger who stays there for some 10 Auster compares Ghosts to “Walden Pond in the heart of the city” (Auster, The Red Notebook 110) Although there are some similarities, circumstances and the outcome of the experience of solitude differ in both books Auster’s characters often reduce their needs to minimum The material world around loses its importance for them The process they undergo “is one of stripping away to some barer condition in which we have to face up to who we are Or who we aren’t It finally comes to the same thing” (Auster, The Red Notebook 109) Thoreau also wanted to “drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms” (Thoreau 63) In this respect, Auster gets close to Thoreau’s idea On the other hand, urban space, as described in Auster’s books, does not provide the same comfort and companionship as nature in Walden Moreover, all the main characters of the trilogy balance between madness and sanity to some extent Their solitude is often connected with feelings of isolation and loneliness Their solitude can help them to explore themselves, but what they find, raises even more questions They not discover a permanent, united self Rather than that, they uncover a fragile and fragmented identity The concept of fragmentation is something generally embraced by postmodern philosophy (Geyh 1) In case of Auster’s characters, however, fragmentation often leads to confusion and disorder Blue, for example, seems to be unable to accept himself as a fragmented being Moreover, Blue’s solitude depicted in Ghosts is more compulsive rather than deliberate He is not able to give up the case, even though he knows that it is just a game Neither Blue nor Black are in complete control of their lives They both seem to be unsure about what they want to achieve Their aloneness gives them some sense of freedom but it severs the links with the outer world at the same time There is no way back for them The anguish they both experience intensifies towards the end of the book The attack each other and Blue leaves the beaten Black lying on the floor What happens next is ambiguous Blue has reached the point of no return and disappears from the story: “For now is the moment that Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and walks through the door And from this moment on, we know nothing” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 196) 33 2.3 The Locked Room The final part of the trilogy is, unlike the previous two, the first-person narrative It is told by an anonymous narrator who is, as we will get to know, in fact the narrator of all three novellas of The New York Trilogy The nameless narrator is again engaged in a search for another person, this time a writer called Fanshawe The narrator is contacted by Fanshawe’s wife Sophie She assumes that her husband is dead because he mysteriously disappeared a long time ago Sophie asks the narrator to take care of Fanshawe’s literary work Due to his effort, Fanshawe’s books are later published and they become famous Meanwhile, the narrator and Sophie fall in love and start to live together Up to this point, everything goes smoothly and leads to a happy ending But, unsurprisingly, it is not about to happen The narrator receives a letter from Fanshawe, saying that he is not dead but only hiding Fanshawe warns the narrator that he must not look for him or tell anyone that he is alive From this point on, the narrator’s life is changed completely He becomes obsessed with trying to find out more about Fanshawe and he can no longer be honest with Sophie This drives him apart not only from her but also from all people around Fanshawe and the narrator were very close friends during their childhood and the bond between them stayed strong even though their lives went separate ways Fanshawe is a part of the narrator It is clear from the very beginning of the book, where the narrator confesses: “It seems to me that Fanshawe was always there He is the place where everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 199) The narrator was always fascinated by Fanshawe’s life and admired him for his charm Now, he has all that used to belong to his idol: his wife, son and even the money for his books Fanshawe’s death would bring him happiness Nevertheless, it is impossible for the narrator to get rid of Fanshawe completely: “He was ghost I carried around inside me, a prehistoric figment, a thing that was no longer real” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 200) Fanshawe’s letter brings the “ghost” back again The narrator must find out everything about Fanshawe so that his “ghost” stops haunting him However, Fanshawe’s mind has always been a closed and impenetrable place for the narrator Fanshawe is “a prolepsis for the string of locked rooms, real and metaphorical, 34 that will follow” (Bernstein 88) The inability to understand his connection with Fanshawe is a cause of a struggle inside the narrator He can no longer lead a normal life The narrator agrees to write Fanshawe’s biography, hoping to find out more him that way He goes through Fanshawe’s past only to discover that he will never be able to unveil the true nature of Fanshawe’s solitary existence: “Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resist telling” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 247) Again, narrator’s quest opens the question of solipsism As it was implied in the other parts of the trilogy as well as in The Invention of Solitude, Auster seem to conclude that it is impossible to penetrate someone else’s mind It is because “our sense of self is formed by the pulse of consciousness within us- the endless monologue, the endless conversation we have with ourselves And this takes place in absolute solitude” (Auster, The Red Notebook 143) Another reason why we cannot understand others is that sometimes we are not able to understand ourselves either It can also be one of the reasons why people like stories They give us a chance for doubling, which is also a central theme of the trilogy (Bernstein 89) Stories give us a unique opportunity to place ourselves into a position of a character with whom we are seemingly familiar When Auster describes it in The Locked Room he explains: We imagine the real story inside the words, and to this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves This is deception We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at the times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence No one can cross the boundary into another- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself (Auster, The New York Trilogy 247) What Auster also seems to point out is that not all stories can be trusted completely Some of them can also resist a definite interpretation There can be as many stories as there are their readers Auster’s prose is full of stories within stories and it is up to their readers 35 to try to find the meaning for themselves It is the tension that emerges when the stories fade into one another that seems to fascinate Auster Fanshawe life story, as described in The Locked Room, is full of allusions to Auster’s personal life He can be seen as yet another Auster’s alter ego put in the novel The only link that connects Fanshawe with the world around is his writing Except from his literary work, he stays mysterious and solitary As with other Auster’s characters, Fanshawe’s writing takes place in solitude His writing is “an attempt to explore the nature of the world” (Varvogli 57) Creative work done in solitude can be also used as a way of self-exploration When the narrator goes through Fanshawe’s letters, he concludes that in Fanshawe’s case “solitude became a passageway into the self, an instrument of discovery” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 278) Nevertheless, he is not successful in that search His writing does not seem to help him much He sacrifices his real life and lives alone, somewhere beyond the reality Fanshawe becomes a ghost for himself: “Writing is a solitary business It takes over your life In some sense, a writer has no life of his own Even when he is there, he is not really there” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 175) The New York Trilogy is filled with references to American writers of the nineteenth century Thoreau, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Emerson and Hawthorne are mentioned throughout the book Auster often uses the themes they explored and puts them in the urban world of the twentieth century He mentions one Hawthorne’s short story called Wakefield It is about a man called Wakefield who leaves his wife one day and mysteriously disappears His wife thinks he is dead but in fact, her husband lives just around the corner and observes what happens when he is not there Wakefield does not know the reason why he is doing it, but he cannot help himself Years go by; he lives alone and even witnesses his own funeral Then suddenly, he decides to return one day The story ends when he opens the door of his old house and steps in What happens next is a mystery This very much resembles the story of The Locked Room But unlike Wakefield, Fanshawe will never come back His solitude goes too far He vanishes for forever from the real world At the end of Wakefield Hawthorne says: “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a 36 fearful risk of losing his place forever Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe” (Hawthorne 298) This is exactly what happens to Fanshawe When someone’s solitude takes over the real life, it can be difficult to find the way back The narrator gradually starts to follow Fanshawe’s fate His obsessive work on Fanshawe’s biography consumes him completely: “I turned to edgy, remote, shut myself up in my little work-room, craved only solitude” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 268) He soon realizes that the biography is nothing more than a way of encountering Fanshawe Later, the narrator leaves Sophie and goes alone to Paris, where he hopes to find some more clues leading to Fanshawe As a detective, however, he fails completely Not only is he unable to find anything but he also loses the control over himself: “I became inert, a thing that could not move, and little by little I lost track of myself” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 293) When he tries to imagine Fanshawe, he can see only one thing: “At best, there was an impoverished image: the door of a locked room That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mystical solitude- living perhaps, breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 293) Here, narrator’s solitude appears to be compulsive and obsessive It closes more doors for him than it opens Unlike Thoreau, for example, the narrator does not find much solace in it After the miserable stay in Paris, the narrator decides to go back to New York Then, suddenly, the situation changes dramatically Fanshawe sends another letter to the narrator and summons him to Boston for their final confrontation In the letter, Fanshawe writes: “This is where it ends, I promise” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 301) The roles change and “the culprit finds the detective” (Varvogli 55) Fanshawe cannot stand his aloneness anymore and decides to die When he meets the narrator in a bleak house in Boston, he speaks with him only from behind a locked door The narrator will never see him Fanshawe gives the narrator the red notebook with his notes, which should explain everything Then, the narrator goes away, leaving dying Fanshawe behind Therefore, Fanshawe will never leave his locked room During their talk, Fanshawe reveals that he is connected with the other characters of the trilogy He claims to have been followed by Quinn and, at the same time, he says that 37 he, Fanshawe, has been observing the narrator and Sophie According to what he says, it can be implied that all the main protagonists of the trilogy, Quinn, Stillman, Black, Blue, Fanshawe and the narrator, have much in common They all try to come to terms with their fragmented self All three parts of The New York Trilogy deal with the solitary quest for identity of a man, represented by the narrator of the trilogy: The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about I don’t claim to have solved any problem I am merely suggesting that a moment came when it no longer frightened me to look at what had happened (Auster, The New York Trilogy 294) The narrator reads through Fanshawe’s notebook but does not see much meaning in what he finds Everything remains unsolved and ambiguous: If I say nothing about what I found there, it is because I understood very little All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other… He (Fanshawe) had answered the question by asking another question and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again (Auster, The New York Trilogy 314) Therefore, the end of the trilogy does not provide any closure or a definite ending Rather than that, it accepts the idea of ambiguity and fragmentation of the self The narrator seems to come to terms with that fact in the end, when he tears out the pages of the red notebook and drops them into a trash bin The narrator seems to be at the beginning of a new start Or, as Auster puts it: “He finally comes to accept his own life, to understand that no matter how bewitched or haunted he is, he accepts the reality as it is, to tolerate the presence of ambiguity within himself He hasn’t slain the dragon, he’s let the dragon move house with him” (Auster, The Red Notebook 111) 38 Conclusion According to my analysis of The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy, it is evident that solitude is a complex term for Paul Auster He explores and approaches it from various angles The first book shows that when solitude is meant only as an escape from social interaction or as a hiding place, it can have a harmful impact on those close to us This is clearly visible from how Auster describes his relationship with his father Moreover, what Auster claims in both books is that it is impossible for a person to penetrate someone else’s mind In this sense, we are all alone because no one else can fully understand our thoughts Our inner life takes place inside our head and therefore always in solitude On the other hand, Auster stresses the possible importance of solitude for creative work, focusing especially on the process of writing An image of a writer sitting alone in a room is a recurrent theme in his books Auster evidently sees writing as a solitary activity, which is not meant negatively He interprets aloneness as a state with a great creative potential At the same time, he tries to put forward some dangers that may entail when the author becomes too immersed in his work Then, the author can lose control or the sense of reality, as it is described on characters of The New York Trilogy What is also typical of Auster’s view of solitude is that although we essentially live our lives alone, there is always some kind of connection with others In our thoughts and memories, we often turn to others We are permanently inhibited by them Therefore, if we accept this point of view, we can be never alone This fact does not contradict the solipsistic attitude mentioned above The can both go hand in hand On the contrary, aloneness can be the time when we are most aware of the connections with others as well as a period of introspection and re-evaluations of our relationships and values in general Lastly, solitude, as depicted in Auster work, is necessary for self-exploration and self-formation For all of the characters of the trilogy, their solitude is closely linked with their search for identity, which is another crucial theme of Auster’s prose Quinn, Blue or the unnamed narrator and, after all, even Auster himself, struggle to find the meaning of their lives and their place in the world Although they are not always successful, Auster seems to suggest that the fundamental question of one’s identity can be answered, if ever, 39 in solitude However, in The New York Trilogy Auster shows that if one’s aloneness goes too far, it can be self-destructive He also mentions that in case of an extreme isolation the boundary between madness and sanity or fiction and reality can be very narrow and blurred This is well reflected in the whole trilogy where the main protagonists often balance on that line To sum up, Auster tries to describe both advantages and dangers of solitude His work, and The New York Trilogy in particular, resist simple interpretation, which is probably one of the things that make his writing so attractive Each reader can become the part of the story and understand it from a different point of view As Auster concludes: “I finally believe that it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer” (Auster, The Red Notebook 111) 40 Resume This work analyses two books written by Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy, in connection with the theme of solitude The main aim of the thesis is to examine Auster’s opinions on the topic and to find out how it is described in the selected books The thesis mentions both positive and negative aspects of solitude and shows how the term is complex for Auster Both The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy are analysed separately and thesis is divided into chapters according to the parts of the books Resumé Tato práce analyzuje dvě knihy Paula Austera, Vynález samoty a Newyorskou trilogii, v souvislosti s tématem samoty Hlavním cílem této práce je prozkoumat Austerovy názory na tuto problematiku a zjistit, jak je popsána ve vybraných knihách Práce zmiňuje jak pozitivní, tak negativní aspekty samoty a ukazuje komplexnost tohoto termínu pro Austera Jak Vynález samoty, tak Newyorská trilogie jsou analyzovány zvláštˇ a práce je rozdělena kapitol podle jednotlivých částí obou knih 41 Bibliography Works cited: Auster, Paul The Invention of Solitude 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The New York Times June 1997 10 March 2008 < http://www.nytimes.com > Kreutzer, Kenneth “Paul Auster: A Brief Biography.” Paul Auster- The Definitive Website.2 April 2008 Merwin, W.S “The Invention of Solitude.” The New York Times 27 Feb.1983 20 March 2008 Nikolic, Dragana “Paul Auster’s Postmodernist Fiction: Deconstructing Aristotle’s Poetics.” Stillman’s Maze March 2008 “Paul Auster.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 12 April 2008 13 April 2008 Rubin, Derek “The Hunger Must Be Preserved at All Cost: A Reading of The Invention of Solitude.” Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster Ed Dennis Barone Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996 60-70 Sim, Stuart Postmodernism London: Routledge, 2001 Sorapure, Madeleine “The Detective and the Author: City of Glass.” Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster Ed Dennis Barone Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996 71-87 Storr, Anthony Solitude: A Return to the Self London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994 Thoreau, Henry David Walden Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1995 44 Ting, Morten “The Notion of `The Room´ in Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude and City of Glass.” Paul Auster- The Definitive Website.20 March 2008 < http://www.paulauster.co.uk/theinventionofsolitude.htm> Tysh, Chris “From One Mirror to Another: The Rhetoric of Disaffiliation in City of Glass.” Literature Online 20 March 2008 Varvogli, Aliki The World That Is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001 Works consulted: Auster, Paul Moon Palace London: Faber and Faber, 1992 - The Music of Chance London: Faber and Faber, 2006 Bible: Písmo svaté Starého a Nového zákona Praha : Ekumenická rada církví v ČSR, 1979 Collodi, Carlo Pinocchiova dobrodružství Praha: Albatros, 2007 45 Appendix 1: Paul Auster’s portrait Source: http://www.gonzalobarr.com/blog/?p=301 Appendix 2: Samuel Auster- Paul Auster’s father Source: http://www.justbuffalo.org/media/pdf/Auster.pdf 46 47 [...]... rooms Many times, he refers to the story of Jonah in a belly of a whale, as well as to the story of Pinocchio and his 19 father, imprisoned in a belly of a shark He describes these stories as metaphors, as reflections of situations similar to his own life Auster understands the Book of Jonah as the most dramatic story of solitude in the Bible It is interesting, that it is also the only one written in the. .. implied in the other parts of the trilogy as well as in The Invention of Solitude, Auster seem to conclude that it is impossible to penetrate someone else s mind It is because “our sense of self is formed by the pulse of consciousness within us- the endless monologue, the endless conversation we have with ourselves And this takes place in absolute solitude (Auster, The Red Notebook 143) Another reason why... City of Glass The theme of solitude is closely linked with the question of identity in City of Glass Quinn, the main character of the book, spends his time alone in a small New York apartment His wife and son died a few years ago, and his life lost its sense Quinn escapes into his solitude and lives in his own world, occupying the space between reality and fantasy He seems to have no ambitions anymore;... aware of our own incoherence No one can cross the boundary into another- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself (Auster, The New York Trilogy 247) What Auster also seems to point out is that not all stories can be trusted completely Some of them can also resist a definite interpretation There can be as many stories as there are their readers Auster s prose is full of stories within... within stories and it is up to their readers 35 to try to find the meaning for themselves It is the tension that emerges when the stories fade into one another that seems to fascinate Auster Fanshawe life story, as described in The Locked Room, is full of allusions to Auster s personal life He can be seen as yet another Auster s alter ego put in the novel The only link that connects Fanshawe with the. .. confronts his real self He does not need his clothes, the room serves as a protective shell, as a place where his soul can manifest itself Solitude is a key to self-discovery and the room is the place where the reassertion of Quinn s identity takes place (Dawson) Quinn writes his thoughts into the red notebook His past, the existence of Max Work and Paul Auster lost their relevance for Quinn: In his heart,... acquire a self from this process Lacan calls it the “mirror-stage”, which strikes me as a beautiful way of putting it Self-consciousness in adulthood is merely an extension of those early experiments It is no longer mother who s looking at us then- we’re looking at ourselves But we can only see ourselves because someone else has seen us first In other words, we learn our solitude from others In the same... other things, however, Auster finds something very precious for him In the bedroom closet, there are dozens of photographs of his father and the family Auster hopes that the photographs can reveal something about his father, something that can help him find the way into Sam Auster s inner world It is rather symbolic when he discovers a photo album entitled “This is Our Life: The Austers” but finds out... through the pieces that his self is made of He examines the role of our memories and the past in our lives, as well as the nature of chance a coincidences in our lives For him, the book wasn’t written as a form of therapy; it was an attempt to turn myself inside-out and examine what I was made of (Auster, The Red Notebook 136) The theme of solitude links the second part of the book with the first one,... is the starting point of the novel Again, there is a writer, this time called Quinn, alone in a room Again, he tries to find his place in the world The situation reminds that of The Invention of Solitude, but this time the reader gets more; he gets a story City of Glass deals with similar questions as The Invention of Solitude, but Auster s approach is different He decides to write a story that still