Nabokov's protagonist's sufferings, suicide, and final happiness in The Eye (1930) can be analyzed through Foucault's policy of the-care of the self‖ based on which an individual acts in a parrhesiastic relationship with himself to panoptically watch and discover himself. Smurov's first-person I/eye sacrifices his former self to be reborn from the surveying eyes of his separated self. This Panopticon metaphor is bifurcated into the monopticon and the synopticon, the former letting Smurov externally watch over himself and the latter reflecting back to him others' views of him. Thus, Smurov recognizes the true nature of his identity to be the sum of his concept of himself and his reflections in others' minds. He recognizes that he is always being panoptically watched and created. His final happiness, therefore, emphasizes that identity stands in a symbiotic relationship with the surveillance of the self, without which the individual stays in darkness.

Possible worlds, governed by known or unknown cosmic rules, if ever they existed, do ontologically exist in the realm of the imaginary and relate to the human potential to imagine beyond what we recognize as reality. This cognitive potential, tinged with postmodernist narrative techniques, can create alternative histories through which to contemplate the possible scenarios of the potential reality that could have happened depending on whether certain events did or did not happen. As far as Auster’s Man in the Dark (2008) is concerned, imagining possible worlds has found an outlet not only through what could happen existentially, but also in terms of quantum physics. As one of Auster’s contributions to alternative fiction, Man in the Dark presents us with a portrait of the underlying currents of world affairs and how they are interrelated through the very basic rules of existential philosophy and astrophysics.

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The voice of conscience, in Heideggerian existentialism, stands for humanity's inherent potency to call himself into an authentic way of living. Heidegger, through this concept, calls us to acknowledge the range of our possibilities in life before death than regret what we have already done. Since authentic living is a process than an end-no salvation being possible in this world-being sensitive to the call is trying to be authentic throughout life. As such, the call acts like taking placebos which keep us hopeful while we are in bad health, although there might be no cure. Paul Auster's Mr Vertigo, being a novel filled with existential themes, can be read to concretise the existential intonation of Heideggerian conscience, following Auster's own existential outlook into the human condition. This paper, by applying an interdisciplinary approach, thus reads Mr Vertigo in the light of Heidegger's certain existential concepts and the implications they have concerning how our existential conscience has a placebo effect. As such, this paper is to argue that Auster's Yehudi in Mr Vertigo plays the role of Walt's voice of conscience to help him with an authentic life style, the novel meanwhile highlighting how the call of conscience can help Heidegger's "Dasein" with the infinity of possibilities it has before death in a world determined by contingency.

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