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

2/ The fiction: a `City of the World'

The characters: literary creations

Throughout these two novels, Auster scatters a number of allusions to the fact that his characters belong to a work of fiction, not to the `real' world. Marco is a typical example of this, his initials, MS, are the abbreviation for the word manuscript, which is Auster's way of reminding us that Marco is a man who exists only on paper. The characters themselves often draw parallels between themselves and heroes of literature. Marco compares his boyhood days to the ones of «some pathetic orphan hero in a nineteenth-century novel.»<sup>125(*)</sup> Later, Effing is said to «talk like a hero in a goddamned book.»<sup>126(*)</sup> Auster himself, when writing on his father's visit in Paris in 1972, says: «The encounter was straight out of Dostoyevsky: bourgeois father comes to visit son in a foreign city and finds the struggling poet alone in a garret, wasting away with fever.»<sup>127(*)</sup> One of Auster's particularities is to place within the situations apparently trivial references to books. When Effing decides to leave his cave in the desert, the narrator says: «He knew that his time in the cave had come to an end -just like that, with the speed and force of a book slamming shut.»<sup>128(*)</sup> Likewise, when Blue, in Ghosts, realizes that the woman he has been courting will never be his wife, he tells himself: «It's time to turn the page.»<sup>129(*)</sup> Through this device, Auster constantly reminds us that we are reading a work of fiction. Besides, in City of Glass, when Quinn leaves Paul Auster's apartment, Auster, in order to contact him, asks Quinn: «Are you in the book?»<sup>130(*)</sup>, as though Auster, the author, was obliquely asking his character whether he belonged to the novel, the latter answering «yes», as if somehow aware of his status as a character. In an interview, Auster explains that for a time, he toyed with the idea of «using an epigraph at the beginning of City of Glass. It comes from Wittgenstein: `And it also means something to talk of living in the pages of a book.'»^131(*) Therefore, Auster seems to say that even though fictional, the characters are nevertheless fully-fledged beings inside the book.

Fiction: prison -Fate: manipulation

Given that the characters `live' in the pages of the book, they are liable to become aware of their statuses as characters, thus realizing their confinement inside the fiction. Marco, listening to Effing's stories, points out that story-telling creates an artificial world, a kind of prison of fiction: «I began to live inside that voice as though it were a room, a windowless room that grew smaller and smaller with each passing day.»<sup>132(*)</sup> This image of the room gradually closing on its occupier is very disturbing, likewise the idea of belonging to a work of fiction as Sophie remarks in the Locked Room «No one wants to be part of a fiction.»<sup>133(*)</sup> What is disturbing in the idea of being part of a fiction is that «in a work of fiction, one assumes there is a conscious mind behind the words on the page.»<sup>134(*)</sup> Therefore, it implies that if you are a character, you are not free: you are confined in a limited space and above all, you are under the control of an author. This is very reminiscent of the synopsis of The Music of Chance in which Nashe and Pozzi are held prisoner in a clearing by two men who use them to do what they want. Consequently, being a character is like being a puppet in the hands of an author who has the power to act on everything in the book like a demiurge. Hence the character's numerous interrogations on the subject of fate. In City of Glass, Quinn wonders: «He had tried to contact Virginia Stillman in order to tell her that he was through, but the fates had not allowed it. Quinn paused for a moment to consider this. Was `fate' really the word he wanted to use?»^135(*) Indeed, the word that Quinn cannot find could very well be the word `author'. But if Quinn is never fully aware of being a character, he nevertheless has doubts concerning fate that he somehow personifies («fates had not allowed it»). Likewise, when his car -with all his money in the trunk- is stolen, Marco immediately suspects some external forces:
«It struck me that the theft had not been committed by men. It was a prank of the gods, an act of divine malice whose only object was to crush me.»^136(*) It seems therefore that the characters become aware of being trapped even though they do not really understand they are characters.

* ¹²⁵ Moon Palace, page 5.

* ¹²⁶ Moon Palace, page 159.

* ¹²⁷ Portrait of an Invisible Man, in The Invention of Solitude, page 65.

* ¹²⁸ Moon Palace, page 181.

* ¹²⁹ Ghosts, page 165.

* ¹³⁰ City of Glass, page 102.

* ¹³¹ Interview with Joseph Mallia, in The Red Notebook, page 110.

* ¹³² Moon Palace, page 184.

* ¹³³ The Locked Room, page 225.

* ¹³⁴ The Invention of Solitude, page 146.

* ¹³⁵ City of Glass, page 111.

* ¹³⁶ Moon Palace, page 305.