Throughout this essay, I will show the characters of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy moving between modernism and postmodernism, and discuss the way some of them epitomize either largely modernist or postmodernist epistemologies. My purpose is to offer a reconstruction of Auster's dialogue across both, and I will resist situating the novelist in either the modern or the postmodern camp. I see him as rather watching from a distance, while his characters scour the terrain (both terrains, as a matter of fact) for him. My conclusion is that Auster seems to acknowledge the inevitability of inhabiting the cultural space of the postmodern, while staking out a claim to question, or even to challenge, some of its presumptions. While modernism still holds a powerful spell for the protagonists ofCity of GlassandGhosts(less so for the latter), the narrator ofThe Locked Roomposits the inextricability of embracing our contemporary sensibility, the postmodern, without necessarily rejecting altogether what went before. Auster associates modernism largely with the secluded, invisible, despicable Fanshawe, whose spell and influence over him the narrator of the third novel of the trilogy manages to break.
Le "New York Trilogy" et la tradition policière