Auster’s Man in the Dark: Human Existence and Responsibility for Creating Possible Worlds

Abstract

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.