Place And The Search For The Self

Moon Palace(1989),written by the American writer Paul Auster,centers around the narrator Fogg and his elder male generations.With the novel’s setting shifting from the private room to the city space of New York,and finally to the vast West,the protagonists set on their respective journeys in search of their selves.This thesis intends to examine the issue of place from the perspective of human geography.Drawing on the theories of place,space and the historical context of the novel,this thesis hopes to analyze the three kinds of places,including room,wandering and no-man’s land,so as to demonstrate how the geographical and cultural particularities of place are interwoven with characters’ searches for the self.First,their private room becomes a territorial place,operating under the mechanism of exclusion and inclusion.Through the inhabitants’ conscious control and regulation,the room becomes a place where the inhabitants are allowed to challenge the Vietnam war and materialism as well as to develop their individual creativity in both the narrative and artistic sense.Secondly,as they venture out of the private room,they commit to wandering,which can be regarded as a mobile place,appropriated either in the physical sense as a place of resistance against the static territorialization of city space,or in the spiritual sense as a place of resistance to the harsh reality.Lastly,the vast,uninhabited land,namely the West and the moon,are places imbued with cultural connotations closely linked with America’s frontier narrative.By aligning themselves with the idealism andsymbolic meanings embodied in frontier rhetoric,the main characters find no-man’s land to be a place of regeneration,both in their occupational identity and social identity.To conclude,by focusing on the interactions between individuals and place in the above three kinds of places,this thesis argues that place,which exerts influences on the self,can transcend a material setting.As the self exploits human agency to control,construct and interpret a place,place can be turned into a medium for the construction,realization and the identification of the self.As such,Auster tries to revoke a deeper understanding of place and the interdependent relationship between the physical environment and the individuals.