| That a postmodern writer such as Paul Auster in his New York Trilogy employs elements from the traditional detective narrative in creating what has been termed anti-detective stories is widely acknowledged, but in doing so, he is close to the narratological experiments of another writer who is rarely included in an anti-detection context, Samuel Beckett. This thesis focuses on two chronologically and stylistically disparate trilogies: Auster's New York Trilogy and Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable whose polyphone and notoriously unstable detective/writer protagonists of these two trilogies foreground a parallel between a classical detectivist code and a hermeneutic reading/writing of the world. In their ultimate exposure and rejection of both, they undermine "the detective-like expectations of the positivistic mind," which, according to critic William V. Spanos, is the most immediate task of the postmodern writer. In their play with and parody of elements from the traditional detective story, both writers investigate ontological "culprits" such as language, identity and presence, demonstrating the ultimate collapse of a rationalist worldview.;The thesis investigates literary detection's inherent potential for its own destruction and its consequent appeal to a postmodern imagination. Finally, the study discusses whether these postmodern trilogies, by challenging and parodying generic conventions and structures, simultaneously reinstate and reaffirm these. |
