The Construction Of Community In The Brooklyn Follies

The Brooklyn Follies is one of the famous works written by contemporary American writer Paul Auster,which portrays a group of ordinary people living in Brooklyn at the turn of twenty-first century.Though they are subjected to commodity culture and power of capitalism in Western world and even alienated and marginalized in New York city with traumatic experiences,they still manage to construct a community in order to get out of the shadowy past and start a new life in Brooklyn.With the help of Ferdinand Tonnies’s concept of community and some other literary theories and criticism,this thesis explores the ways and categories of community construction in The Brooklyn Follies,and meanwhile some factors contributing to community construction are analyzed,hoping to find out how these alienated characters construct a new community in Brooklyn through hard work and community imagination and start their new life successfully under the oppression of capitalist political,economic and cultural system.This thesis consists of five parts.The introduction part mainly introduces Paul Auster and his work The Brooklyn Follies and makes literature review of the writer and his related fiction both at home and abroad with the purpose of demonstration of the significance of the present thesis.The first chapter focuses on the construction of blood community in the novel.Before coming to Brooklyn,these main characters are marginalized in the mainstream society because of their life in love-absence families.Through their re-connection with their relatives around them and imagination of "Beautiful Perfect Mother",they rebuild their family relationships and find their own happiness and life goals,and a community based upon blood kinship is constructed in Brooklyn.The second chapter explores the construction of geographic community.Although these main characters are isolated and estranged from their fellow men in some other parts of America,they share their ideas with each other and express their longing for a perfect life through imagination of an inner refuge,i.e.the "Hotel Existence",after gathering in Brooklyn.They develop harmonious relationships with their friends,colleagues and even neighbors in Brooklyn,which proves to be a right place for them to gather together.The third chapter analyzes how spiritual community is constructed in Brooklyn.Living in the post-industrial era when one’s success is evaluated through wealth and social status,the spiritual life of characters is chaotic and even lacking.In the process of writing and reading,they are mentally cured and thus regaining their own identities and acquiring a new understanding of life and death.A new community is constructed based on their humanitarianism thoughts in Brooklyn.In the conclusion part,the thesis points out that in the society of Western capitalism,the marginalized and ordinary people could reconstruct a humanistic community in which each one can be promoted and shaped through community imagination and positive contact with the outside worldExperiencing the 9/11 terrorist attack and the 2000 election,Paul Auster changes his postmodernist narrative ways in the past and has started a new realistic way to present the world.The happy ending of The Brooklyn Follies obviously reflects his initial intention to console himself,Americans,and even those who have been negatively influenced by the miserable experience in the 9/11 attack and the War of Iraq in the world.