ABSTRACT
In the fourth chapter of this book, I will turn my attention to Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. The intricate structure of the trilogy, the inclusion of a story within a story, and the characterization of a Brooklyn-based writer named Paul Auster, all adhere to the obvious tenets of literary postmodernism. The New York Trilogy comprises three short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. Comparable to Auster’s later writings, his triptych investigates the status of the author, the plight of the individual, and the relationships between fathers and sons. In each novel, a writer immerses himself in the remit of a selfobsessed quest to locate his enigmatic alter ego. These covert surveillance activities prove misguided however, and in the end, the protagonist of each novel suffers as a consequence of his interaction with his adversarial duplicate. In City of Glass, Auster borrows the name William Wilson from Edgar Allan Poe’s story that deals with döppelgangers and duality. As such, Auster comments upon the configuration of The New York Trilogy as a whole. In each installment of the trilogy, Auster ensures that the lack of cognitive certainty, associated with unstable and multiple narrative perspectives, contributes towards an ambiguous and indeterminate reading of the novels.
