| Paul Auster is one of the most provocative voices in contemporary American literary world. This paper seeks to discuss the "anti-detective" narrative in his postmodern fiction Oracle Night. It examines the fiction's subversion of classical detective stories in its narrative motif, narrative structure and narrative language. The traditional detective story aims at a solution to the presented mystery, and the gathering and analyzing of clues, evidences and testimonies all revolved around this end. While Oracle Night assumes the gesture of the conventional genre, each protagonist finds himself trapped in the insoluble mysteries of the events coming one after another to his life. Actually, the mystery has nothing to do with the solution. The narrative motif has been shifted from revealing the mysteries or rescuing a locked person to the frustrated search for meaning of existence in the postmodern world. In detective fiction, a faithful description of the settings, the characters and the complicated interpersonal relationship within the society being investigated plays an essential part in the appreciation of the story. However, in Auster's fictional world, communicating among people is impossible, for language fails to perform its expressive or symbolic function as it is supposed to.The language here is marked by its fragmentation, inconsistency, uncertainty and instability, simulating the plight of an alienated, fragmented, and desperately empty modern self. Through deconstruction of the prescriptive conventions in a detective fiction, Auster wants to present the living predicaments of modern people. The structured and logic oriented narrative of the traditional detective stories, also with a view to the solution, directly conveys the roots of evil in the society. Anti-detective novel no longer advocates the power of reason; no longer trust persuasion according to the logic. By means of the subversion of the narrative in traditional detective stories,the anti-detective fiction leads the reader to think about the question—how to pursuit a meaning and value of their limited lives. The anti-detective fiction seems a better representation of the reality in our life than the conventions form which it derives. |
