Fighting Fathers/Saving Sons: The Struggle for Life and Art in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy

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.