Confinement in Paul Auster's Moon Palace and the New York Trilogy

• CONTENTS
  
• INTRODUCTION
  
• I. SPATIAL CONFINEMENT
  
  • A SOCIAL DEATH
    
    • 1/ Disconnection
      
    • The island
      
    • Metaphoric rooms
      
    • 2/ Starving
      
    • Depletion
      
    • Flirting with death
      
    • The monk and the hermit
      
  • B TOWARDS ORIGINS
    
    • 1/ The room
      
    • The shelter
      
    • The retreat
      
    • The search for THE place
      
    • 2/ The Womb
      
    • The experience of the cave
      
    • Jonah or the resurrection
      
    • Gestation: birth or miscarriage
      
  • C SEARCH FOR HARMONY
    
    • 1/ Success and failure
      
    • The New Man
      
    • Reconnection
      
    • Obliteration
      
    • 2/ Art
      
    • The room: the matrix of artistic creation
      
    • The artist in exile
      
    • The hunger artist
      
• II. TELLING STORIES
  
  • A THE WRITING OF THE BOOK
    
    • 1/ Writing for myself
      
    • Motivations
      
    • A paradoxical necessity
      
    • Writing: moving inward and outward
      
    • 2/ The book
      
    • Books and notebooks
      
    • The creation of another world
      
    • The limits of the book
      
  • B ENCIRCLING FICTION
    
    • 1/ The Russian-doll effect
      
    • Bridges between the spheres of fiction
      
    • Stories about story-telling
      
    • 2/ The fiction: a `City of the World'
      
    • The characters: literary creations
      
    • Fiction: prison -Fate: manipulation
      
    • To get out of the house of fiction
      
  • C THE AUTHOR-CHARACTERS
    
    • 1/ A search for authorship
      
    • Characters in quest of their fathers
      
    • Investigating
      
    • 2/ Seeking for authority
      
    • Playing the puppet-master
      
    • Control over life and death
      
    • Who controls whom?
      
• III. LANGUAGE
  
  • A WORDS AND WORLDS
    
    • 1/ Constitution of worlds
      
    • The Library of the Universe
      
    • Worlds within the word
      
    • Language makes our world and us.
      
    • 2/ Between the World and the Self
      
    • The inadequacy of the word
      
    • The rift between thinking and writing
      
    • Investigation of language/ Investigation of the self
      
  • B ATTEMPTS AT MASTERING LANGUAGE
    
    • 1/ To go back to the origins
      
    • Babel
      
    • Giving names to things
      
    • Giving names to people
      
    • 2/ To capture the essence
      
    • Factuality: a failure
      
    • The achievements
      
    • Blank spaces
      
  • C GASPING FOR CORRESPONDENCES
    
    • 1/ Transparency and liberty
      
    • Between the man and the world: the sign
      
    • The sign and communication
      
    • The need for transparency
      
    • 2/ Meaning
      
    • Seeking connectedness
      
    • Beware of meaning
      
    • Hermeneutics
      
• CONCLUSION
  
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
  
• Critical works on Paul Auster
  
• Other works consulted