A Study On The Postmodern Biographic Features Of Paul Auster's The Invention Of Solitude

Paul Auster(1947-)is a very influential American contemporary writer,whose oeuvre is characterized by distinct features of postmodernism and Jewishness.The Invention of Solitude,published in 1982,is Auster's first biography,containing his meditation on his father's identity and his own identity crisis.This work is not only the key to understand Auster and his oeuvre,but also an avant-garde postmodern biography,which subverts traditional biography from perspective of fundamental biographic concepts and narrative art.As for narrative art,The Invention of Solitude adopts anti-biography to deconstruct traditional biographic narrative paradigm.It wields meta-narrative,Russian-doll narrative structure,digression to construct a fragmented narrative structure;it shifts between the first-person and the third-person points of view,and infuses multiple voices;it blends chronological order,spatial order,thematic order together and unifies linear narrative and non-linear narrative.As regards the reconstruction of biographee,self becomes the product of the negotiation of multiple selves,self and the other,self and the world.As the representation of reality,fact and fiction are interwoven with each other.Fact lays the foundation of biography,while fiction endows The Invention of Solitude with literariness and artistry.In regard of value orientation,The Invention of Solitude not only focuses on the recognition of self and the external world,but also provides a kind of aesthetic entertainment to a certain extent.The Invention of Solitude demonstrates Auster's fundamental biographic concept:biography cannot fully resurrect the dead,but it does serve to promote man's cognition of self and external world.This concept is closely related to his Jewishness,existentialism in France and postmodernism.