| Paul Auster (1947-) is the contemporary American writer of eighteen novels, three memoirs, a volume of selected poems, a collection of critical essays, and four screenplays. Before the publication of The New York Trilogy, he was known primarily for having edited the Random House Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and for having written several insightful literary essays. In the short period of time since the publication of the Trilogy, Auster has attracted international attention and been elevated to celebrity status. His criticism has witnessed an exponential growth since 1995. Frequently compared to authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Beckett to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Auster is now acclaimed one of America's most praised contemporary novelists. And his work is hailed by many French critics as one of the great revelations of American literature in recent years.Despite this success, the American critic Sven Birkerts has a point when he describes Auster as "the ghost at the banquet of contemporary American letters" (Birkerts, 1992: 338). Auster has synthesized postmodernist literary devices, existentialist theories and a fluid, readable writing style in his work. The philosophical dimension of his writing, as well as his abiding interest in understanding the whole complex fabric of existence, invests his work with an intellectual depth lacking in much contemporary American fiction. His fictional world is governed by chance and absurdity. The foregrounding of the chance element plays an important role in his definition of realism which contends that life is literally meaningless. There is no truth, but one runs after it all the same. It is this paradox, the twin impulses of looking for meaning and accepting the meaningless of the world, that Auster explores in his fiction. This attempt makes his characters restless inquisitors who undertake solitary journeys across the vastness of America in pursuit of ends of which even they themselves are unaware. If those characters are not traveling outwards, they are bound to take the journey within, seeking the means by which they can be alive in the fullest sense. Entangled in a textual universe that is itself an effect of incessantly gliding signifiers, the fate of those characters becomes a question of whether they can adapt to that situation in the process of their quest for meaning. And it is the ability to embrace the meaningless as the first principle, the ability to go on when they can't go on, that ultimately decides over the success or failure of Auster's subjects.Although recent years see Auster's fame on the rise in China and seven of his novels have been translated into Chinese, there is not much academic concern accompanying his popularity. The lack of critical enthusiasm somewhat hinders the Chinese reader from getting a comprehensive understanding of this author. The dissertation offers some possible explanations for many questions raised in Auster's fiction, but it does not try to decide them once for all. Instead, it serves as groundwork for understanding Auster, especially to the Chinese reader, and it invites further discussion in Chinese academic field.The focus of this dissertation is on the major themes of Auster's fiction. Throughout his work Auster is preoccupied with certain recurrent set of themes and issues, such as the isolation of the individual, the mystery of the self, the inadequacy of language, the impossibility of knowledge, and the overwhelming lack of cognitive certainty associated with the contemporary Western life. Those themes and issues constitute Auster's persistent quest for the meaning of existence. Accordingly, quest is the master-narrative of this dissertation. It is defined as thematic narrative which represents the struggle of the individual for the attainment of some understanding. This understanding consists not only of making assertions about the world, but of the interpretation of one's place in the world.In light of the remarkable diversity concerning the themes and genres Auster works with, it is necessary to take a dialectical method to interpret Auster's fiction, which combines historical, philosophical, theoretical study together with textual analysis. This dissertation covers eight of Auster's novels which are considered by many critics as his canon. Auster's themes and writing strategies evoke the postmodernist and existentialist theories, which will serve as the interpretive tools of this dissertation. But those theories are not referred to systematically; instead, some concepts are chosen when they converge with Auster's poetics. In addition, some philosophical and literary ideas are employed on the suggestion of Auster's fiction, such as Foucault's notion of power relations, the concept of redemption and rebirth in Judaism, and the Marxist discussion of freedom. Those ideas also provide a fruitful background for the reading of Auster's themes. The dissertation consists of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. The introduction gives a general account of Auster's life and career, the historical and cultural context of his work, the philosophical and literary influences on him, and his popularity in France, America and China. It provides compelling reasons for regarding Auster as a major contemporary American writer and at the same time introduces the contents of this dissertation.The first chapter is primarily devoted to The Invention of Solitude and can be read as Auster's inquiry of his historical identity and situation. In the first section of the book, Portrait of an Invisible Man, Auster attempts to penetrate the mystery of his father's self and render it into words. This attempt drives Auster to embark on the frequently recurring quest for father in Jewish literature. Many of Auster's fiction are structured around the son's quest for the father. In most cases, the quest does not close in on itself; instead, it extends and transforms into various quests for identity, truth, justice, and the nature of narration and representation. In the second section, The Book of Memory, Auster's attempt to understand his own self gradually gives way to the meditation on the role of memory in the construction of identity, hence bringing into the foreground all his concerns of traumatic Jewish history, the possible way of individual and national redemption, and the Jewish attitude towards writing. Moreover, as Auster's epistemological and philosophical thinking is largely shaped by existentialist ideas, his exploration of Jewish themes and images is inextricably entangled with the existentialist concepts of the self, death and being. The paradox of death and rebirth is the central connotation of Auster's recurring image "room": the room not only conveys the ontological fear of solitude and death, but it is also the original site of imagination and creativity.The second chapter takes up the discussion of freedom and explores Auster's social and political quest for understanding of human situation. Auster's understanding of freedom contains some ambiguous implications. On the one hand, he believes that freedom is an essential trait of spirit, developing according to its own inner law rather than in response to some extrinsic forces. On the other hand, he contends that a person's freedom is always limited by several factors. The first and foremost factor is the innate contradiction of freedom itself: the obsession with freedom turns man into the captive of compulsion, and freedom reveals its oppressive character in his addiction for it. Secondly, chance, either as an aspect of meaningless randomness or as a glimpse into the mysterious structure of the universe, is also a factor that dominates an individual's existence. Thirdly, Auster understands the self as an effect of disciplinary and normalizing power regimes. In The Music of Chance, American society is a highly disciplined society. The web of discipline in this carceral society shapes the individual into a docile, obedient subject. His obedience not only comes from his subjection to rules and orders that are exercised continually around him and upon him, but also from his automatic function of all the suppression upon himself. Through charting the protagonists' futile struggle for self-determination and freedom in the novel, Auster reveals the fact that the late twentieth-century American capitalism determines with irresistible force the lives of all Americans that are born into the system, especially those who are confined to the stratum of the have-nots. Although Power constrains everyone, the poor are always the ones that are most violently threatened and exploited. In this way, Auster explores the disillusionment of the American Dream, which is also one of the major themes in Leviathan and City of Glass.The third chapter traces Auster's linguistic quest for knowledge and identity. Based on the profound split between sign and referent as well as between the signifier and the signified, the quest for knowledge in The New York Trilogy cannot come to rest in closure: there is no meaning to unravel, or, even if there is one, it is forever deferred. This concept of language not only prevents the detectives from decoding evidence and understanding reality, but it further thwarts them to identify (intentional) criminals: there is no true core of a Self, but many Selves that are fluctuating and changeable, refusing to add up to a whole Self. This fragmentation and impenetrability of the self frustrates the detectives' attempt to understand their opponents, which, in turn, releases the mystery of the self inside the detectives themselves. During the process of detection, what the detectives face is not only the missing self of their opponents, but the lost, doubled, stolen or exchanged identities of themselves. However, it would be wrong to conclude that Auster denies any possibility of establishing identity. In fact, he believes that a unified identity is still available. It is not constructed merely by one's roles in personal life; it consists both of his historical identity as a member of a specific ethnic group and his role as a participant in the world. The fourth chapter investigates the anti-genre narrative mode of Auster's quests. Although most of Auster's novels are written within the conventions of certain genres, they invariably subvert the models in the process of narration. In The Invention of Solitude, Auster reveals that postmodernist (auto-)biography has undergone a radical shift from its original emphases on authority, authenticity and coherence to the emphasis on experimentation. It not only recognizes the impossibility of achieving the completeness of the self, but it blurs the border between fact and fiction to represent the chaos in life and disqualifies the author as the exclusive authority on writing. In The New York Trilogy, Auster subverts the conventions of detective story by constructing a labyrinthine world of text that is made up of spatial maze, self-negating narrative and transworld characters. He peppers the three novels with his autobiographical information, making the characters double not only one another, but the author as well. The fictionalization of the author disrupts the logic of narrative hierarchy, hence further destabilizing the already fluid and unstable fictional reality. In The Music of Chance, the plot moves from journey to enforced fixity, depriving the novel of the structural foundation of the picaresque narrative. However, it is important to note that subversion is not the final goal of Auster's quests; rather, it is a way to represent the process of understanding. And this process of understanding, in Auster's eyes, is what finally defines an individual's existence.The conclusion of this dissertation gives a general comment on the contributions and limitations of Auster's writing. Auster is distinguished from other contemporary American writers by his obsession with the quest of being. For him, the true purpose of art is not to create beautiful objects, but to penetrate the world and find one's place in it. This attempt to understand is the driving power that forces Auster's protagonists to embark on various quests. Auster takes into consideration all the historical, ethnical, linguistic and ideological influences and tries to reach a comprehensive understanding of being that finally derives from human connections. However, it should be noted that Auster's worldview is essentially negative. His intense personal despair derives from the lack of certainty associated with contemporary American living experience. When this uncertainty is transferred from the enigma of reality to the ontological questions of language, self and authorship, indeterminacy eventually becomes all encompassing. Auster reacts with the courage of despair in two ways: the creation of despairing but persevering characters and the exposition of writing process that never abandons the struggle to make sense of what has no sense. But this stance constitutes at the same time the very limitation of his work. Auster's social critique never goes further to yield any advocacy of profound social engagement and commitment. His protagonists, more often than not, are the individuals who possess a limited perception of the working of the world. They indulge in their solitary consciousness rather than work for the general benefits of the masses. This egoism finally prevents them from achieving self-fulfillment through serving the needs of the world progress.
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