We have to face up to who we are. Or who we aren't : Paul Auster's examination of truth and identity

Abstract

Paul Auster has been publishing work for over thirty years. His novels display a fascination with the idea of identity, the nature of storytelling and the concepts of memory and truth, how they inform each other and how they maintain a constant state of de stabilisation. His characters are often dislocated from their environments, finding themselves in contexts that they have difficulty aligning themselves with. Auster constructs narratives that problematise notions of structure and coherence: his texts scrutinise the presence and absence of meaning, the predominance of contingency and meaninglessness in the course of an individual's life and the consistent efforts undertaken by the individual to maintain equilibrium in the face of such inconstant constants. This thesis examines four prevalent concerns in Auster's fiction: narrative, memory, identity, and truth, and focuses on how the respective texts figure the treatment of incohesion and dehiscence in their character's perception of themselves and their contexts. Auster's awareness of the responsibilities and challenges of expression and how they correspond with the creation and perpetuation of individual identity is explored in the first chapter, "'That Is Not My Real Name': Layers of Identity in The New York Trilogy." The second chapter, '"A Little Gray Mouse': Genre and Context in The Music of Chance, Timbuktu and In the Country of Last Things", locates three of his texts within a framing genre with comparative readings of seminal and contemporary texts of that genre, and examines how Auster's texts detail the inevitable effect that context and trauma has upon the individual and their concept of their identity and their environment. The third chapter, "'Walking Around in a Dead Man's Clothes': Posthumous Narratives and Self-Construction in Moon Palace, Oracle Night and The Book of Illusions", explores the notion of identity as a constructed and oppositional concept that is inevitably linked to the individual's perspective upon and perception of his social and personal contexts. The final chapter, "'We Learn Our Solitude From Others': Absence and Memory in Auster's Memoirs and Beyond", examines the treatment of solitude, the figuring of memory and the plurality of truths that recur in Auster's fictional and autobiographical texts.