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

To get out of the house of fiction

Once they are aware of being prisoners, the characters -naturally enough- try to escape. «He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit down in a room and go on reading for the rest of his life (...) But how to get out? How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?»^137(*) To this question, the characters give different answers as so many escape attempts. Stillman allegedly commits suicide: he jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge, as if he had decided to disappear in the void between the stories. As for Quinn, he has no time to escape since the author obliterates him once his part is played out. In Ghosts, the author, or more precisely the figure of the author embodied in the character Black/White, tries to obliterate Blue at the end: «I don't need you anymore Blue (...) It's finished. The whole thing is played out. There's nothing more to be done.»^138(*) But this time, unlike in City of Glass, it is Blue who kills his author and then runs away. This radical form of escape that can be called `authoricide' seems to be efficient insofar as Blue seems to have escaped the narrator and Auster himself: «And from this moment, we know nothing.»<sup>139(*)</sup> The narrator-hero in The Locked Room, contemplates killing his character, the subject of his book, but he eventually decides against this, rather destroying the book and escaping in a train. As far as Marco is concerned, his escape is somewhat different. At the end of the book, Marco reaches the end of the continent and says: «This is where I start, (...) this is where my life begins.»<sup>140(*)</sup> With this open ending, Auster seems to suggest that Marco, through his successful crossing of the book, has somehow gained the status of a `free character', able to live on his own outside the novel. But on the whole, there is a method that the characters try in order to escape: to become writers in their turn, like the narrator-hero in The Locked Room who declares: «If courage is needed to write about it, I also know that writing about it is the one chance I have to escape.»^141(*)

* ¹³⁷ Ghosts, pages 169-170.

* ¹³⁸ Ghosts, page 193.

* ¹³⁹ Ghosts, page 196.

* ¹⁴⁰ Moon Palace, page 306.

* ¹⁴¹ The Locked Room, page 235.