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

Beware of meaning

Faced with a number of instances of coincidental connectedness, Austerian characters, as previously seen, tend to cast around for other connections, in the hope of discovering `some fundamental truth about the world.»^243(*) During his investigation on the Stillman's case, Quinn is subject to such a behaviour. He ends up connecting truly unrelated ideas, trying to see some significance in their connection. However, his attempts lead him nowhere:

The centerfielder [of the Mets] he remembered, was Mookie Wilson, a promising young player whose real name was William Wilson. Surely there was something interesting in that. Quinn pursued the idea for a few moments but then abandoned it. The two Wiliam Wilsons cancelled each other out, and that was all.^244(*)

As a matter of fact, the last pages of Quinn's red notebook are filled with such attempts at connection. Quinn's attitude is perilous because he genuinely expects some revelation, some significance from the connections he makes , and this is probably the main reason why he obliterates himself at the end. Indeed, in The Invention of Solitude, there is a passage which seems to be meant to apply to Quinn and it sounds like a warning from Auster:

Like everyone else, he craves a meaning. Like everyone else, his life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. The connection exists. But to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imaginary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand.^245(*)

Hence, for Auster, seeking a meaning is the danger that lies in wait behind connectedness. Marco in Moon Palace, declares: «I was desperate for a certainty, and I was prepared to do anything to find it.»^246(*) Likewise Quinn is desperate for a meaning and he actually does everything and anything to find it, going as far as to invent it, thereby «building an imaginary world inside the real world.»^247(*) Quinn is therefore an illustration of the danger of seeking meaning at all costs. Contrary to him, the narrator-hero in The Locked Room realizes that «in the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.»^248(*) In this, the narrator-hero's opinion meets that of Auster who once declared : «our lives don't belong to us, you see -they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.»^249(*) So, though meaning might exist, it is nevertheless not accessible to us, and to want to find it out is risky, as Thomas R Edwards wrote in an article about Auster in The New York Review of Books: «meaning, Auster appreciates, is something we add to life at our peril»^250(*) but Thomas Edwards carries on, saying: «But he also appreciates how hard it is to avoid meaning, and how much more perilous it would be to settle for a merely nominal reality without at least wanting more.»^251(*) Therefore, to avoid meaning seems almost impossible, for the characters are surrounded by connections that seem to be meaningful and we must bear in mind that Austerian characters are seekers.

* ²⁴³ Moon Palace, page 33.

* ²⁴⁴ City of Glass, page 128.

* ²⁴⁵ The Invention of Solitude, page 147.

* ²⁴⁶ Moon Palace, page 74.

* ²⁴⁷ The Invention of Solitude, page 147.

* ²⁴⁸ The Locked Room, page 217.

* ²⁴⁹ An interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, in The Red Notebook, page 117.

* ²⁵⁰ New York review of Books: Sad Young Men (August, 17, 1989), page 53.

* ²⁵¹ Ibid.