Fighting fathers /saving sons: The struggle for life and art in Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy"
Item
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Title
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Fighting fathers /saving sons: The struggle for life and art in Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy"
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Identifier
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AAI3283188
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identifier
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3283188
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Creator
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Dupre, Joan Alcus.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William P. Kelly
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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This study offers a new reading of the three novels that make up Paul Auster's New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. My claim is that in order to fully appreciate Auster's fiction, it is essential that we understand how the relationship between fathers and sons functions for Auster on three levels. The first level is biological paternity. We must be aware, I contend, of the significance of Auster's troubled relationship with his biological father, for this uneasy bond underlies---and is manifested in---all of Auster's work.;The second level is literary paternity, which involves Auster's relationship with his literary forefathers, especially Cervantes, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Poe. These literary fathers are the ghosts that haunt the Trilogy---the positive father figures Auster wrestles with and ultimately embraces.;The third level is ethical and aesthetic paternity, the level on which Auster's progeny, his characters, operate. These are the father and son figures who are also detectives and writers who embark on quests to save---or at least fathom---a son or a father. These characters and their quests reflect Auster's struggle with his biological and literary fathers and his ethical and aesthetic agenda.;The novels in the Trilogy are fundamentally about identity: who we are, especially if we are writers, and how we should function in a world where random events seem to govern our existence and the chasms between us seem unbridgeable, even (or perhaps especially) with language. The novels explore the themes of loss and solitude---and the confusion we may feel in this postmodern age when the lines between reality and illusion are hopelessly obscured, the belief in the value of art is tenuous, and the battle to live as a solitary writer without severing human contact and destroying oneself can be torturous.;Finally, however, the Trilogy validates the heroism of its protagonists and ends with the very bridging of chasms that seems impossible at the beginning of the first novel. Therefore, this study underscores what I submit is foregrounded in the novels: the human relationships and the art that endures.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
