Fighting Fathers/Saving Sons

This book offers a new reading of the novels
that make up Paul Auster s New York Trilogy: City of
Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. 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: biological
paternity; literary paternity; and ethical and
aesthetic paternity. The novels in the Trilogy are
fundamentally about identity. They 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 book
underscores what I submit is foregrounded in the
novels: the human relationships and the art that
endures.

Autorentext

Joan Alcus Dupre is Assistant Professor of English atQueensborough Community College of the City University of NewYork, where she teaches courses in fiction, poetry, drama,pop culture and composition. A graduate of New YorkUniversity, she received her Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center,specializing in Modern and Postmodern literature.

Klappentext

This book offers a new reading of the novelsthat make up Paul Auster's New York Trilogy: City ofGlass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. To fullyappreciate Auster's fiction, it is essential that weunderstand how the relationship between fathers andsons functions for Auster on three levels: biologicalpaternity; literary paternity; and ethical and aesthetic paternity. The novels in the Trilogy are fundamentally about identity. They 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 book underscores what I submit is foregrounded in the novels: the human relationships and the art that endures.