No abstract

Paul Auster's recent novel, The Brooklyn Follies (2006), opens with a stunning line-"I was looking for a quiet place to die"-and closes with a faintly foreshadowed but still shocking reference to the "brilliant blue sky" under which the protagonist walks in New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001 (1,306). Auster's framing of the novel's action between moments of personal and national trauma points to one of the abiding preoccupations of his career. Best known for his narrative puzzles constructed around a postmodern metaphysics of identity, as in his early New York Trilogy , Auster also takes his stories of ontological and epistemological uncertainty outside the purely metaphysical realm within which the subject intuits his own fundamental lack of presence. Often in such instances, Auster dramatizes lack by way of narratives of missing persons, especially as seen from the point of view of those left behind. At times, these narratives recount a personal loss-of a family member or lover-and at others, they move within a national landscape, providing in their missing figures metaphoric surrogates for an impersonal or cultural lack. In both cases, however, Auster explores the possibility that loss is a historical, and hence potentially narratable, condition. Such a premise leaves open the potential for moving beyond loss, a potential that each novel questions in its own way and that ultimately structures each narrative trajectory according to the psychoanalytic pattern of acting-out and working-through associated with the process of mourning.Since a central absence shadows and directs Auster's novels, they tend to follow a narrative pattern of quest or detection in which the questing figuregenerally the narrator or his surrogate-seeks the missing person, either literally or in the figurative terrain of knowledge and understanding. Consider, for example, from early in his career, Auster's search for the story of his father in the memoir The Invention of Solitude (1982), the diegetic "Paul Auster"

No abstract

The article examines Roth's exploitation of his own persona through self-reference in his writing. It argues that throughout his career, Roth has challenged readers' expectations of the truth value of narratives that simultaneously expose, conceal, and rewrite the autobiographical subject—the "I" in the text. Roth has thereby not only explored postmodern epistemologies of identity, but also has offered fresh angles on the problem of writing the self in a variety of genres: from autobiography and memoir to dialogue and reflexive fiction.

No abstract