On Indeterminacy Characteristics In New York Trilogy

Paul Auster,the winner of the Spanish Asturias Prize for Literature in 2006,was one of the most outstanding and creative novelists in contemporary America.Since 1980 s,he has been on the postmodernist literary world in the United States.Since then,he has shown the readers a fickle and elusive postmodern world with his silent and cold style.The New York Trilogy is Paul Auster's famous work and the turning point of his unique creative style.This paper takes the New York Trilogy as the text analysis object.Based on the theory of postmodernism,this paper analyzes the postmodern nature of the novel indeterminacy through combing and reading the text.Indeterminacy is one of the basic characteristics of postmodernist literature,which is mainly reflected in the postmodernists' questioning of the world's knowability and the pursuit of the development things.The author intends to elaborate the concrete embodiment of uncertainty in the New York Trilogy from four aspects: theme,identity,plot and language.This paper mainly includes three parts.The first part is the introduction,this part mainly introduces Paul Auster's literary creations,general idea of New York Trilogy,domestic and international studies on Auster especially on New York Trilogy.On this basis,the “uncertainty” in postmodernism novels are interpreted,and the main contents and research significance of this paper are pointed out.The second part is composed of four chapters.The first chapter analyzes the uncertainty of the theme.First,the truth and fiction in the New York Trilogy appear alternately and the boundaries are blurred.Second,the themes in the novel are numerous and complex,such as topics of pursuit,death and language loss.The second chapter discusses from the uncertainty of identity.In the novel,the identity of the character and the identity of the narrator are both uncertain.The former reflects the change of identity between the self and the other.The latter makes it possible for Auster to deliberately set up the identity of the narrator so that the story can be extended.The third chapter is mainly focused on the uncertainty of the plot,respectively from the plot of discontinuity,plot contingency,the plot of the blank and the opening of the plot.The fourth chapter mainly discusses the uncertainty of language.Auster pays close attention to the variation of contemporary language,and reveals the language predicament of of postmodern society through expression of the break between the signifier and finger and express it's anxiety and confusion about all kinds of subjective issues.The last part is the conclusion,which is summary of the “indeterminacy” presented in the New York Trilogy discussed in the this article.