Quest For And Loss Of Identity:the Infinite Loop In The New York Trilogy

As the representative work of Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy is concerned with his leitmotif of the dilemma that people meet in the postmodern society. In this fiction, Paul Auster expresses his distinctive understanding of identity by telling three stories that are seemly independent but are actually interrelated to each other. All the three stories apply and deconstruct the traditional elements of detective story, resulting in a recurrent investigation of identity, nature, and meaning of language. The characters in each stories share the same experience of losing themselves after being confronted with others.In this thesis, the present author will study The New York Trilogy as an infinite loop of quest for and loss of identity. In order to explore the reason why the characters in the trilogy are trapped in this infinite loop, the thesis will be discussed from three aspects. The present author will first expound the quest for identity through language game by examining the function of language which serves itself as an unstable foundation of meaning and unavailing endeavor to solve identity crisis. Then, to explain why the characters lose their identity, the process of how the text deconstructs itself will be discussed. Moreover, the present author will illustrate the formation of the infinite loop which includes the paradoxically process of synchronic quest and loss. Through the analysis of The New York Trilogy,it can be concluded that those characters’ quest for identity is a quest for nothing in essence; their endeavor to solve identity crisis is a paradox which contradicts itself and is also an infinite loop that will never end.