Fighting Fathers/Saving Sons

This book offers a new reading of the novels
that make up Paul Auster s New York Trilogy: City of
Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. To fully
appreciate Auster s fiction, it is essential that we
understand how the relationship between fathers and
sons functions for Auster on three levels: biological
paternity; literary paternity; and ethical and
aesthetic paternity. The novels in the Trilogy are
fundamentally about identity. They explore the
themes of loss and solitude and the confusion we may
feel in this postmodern age when the lines between
reality and illusion are hopelessly obscured, the
belief in the value of art is tenuous, and the
battle to live as a solitary writer without severing
human contact and destroying oneself can be
torturous. Finally, however, the Trilogy validates
the heroism of its protagonists and ends with the
very bridging of chasms that seems impossible at the
beginning of the first novel. Therefore, this book
underscores what I submit is foregrounded in the
novels: the human relationships and the art that
endures.