A Study Of The Narrative Self In Paul Auster’s The Book Of Illusions

Paul Auster(1947-)is an American novelist,poet,translator,and director.His works have influenced readers worldwide.The Book of Illusions(2002)is one of Auster’s most representative works.It recounts an uncanny story in which the protagonist,Professor David Zimmer loses his wife and children in the air crash.He is accidentally attracted by the missing silent film actor Hector Mann and then publishes a biography for Hector.Later,he is invited to unearth the truth of Hector,and his life is changed forever.Elements including the language game,shifting narrative perspectives,meta-narrative,exquisite nested narrative,and cinematic narrative embody Auster’s self-quest in narrative.From the perspective of narrative self,this thesis purports to analyze the self-reference signs,narrative perspectives,and narrative stratification respectively to discuss the strong self-consciousness in this novel,laying bare the identity crisis and illusionary condition of life and exploring the cause and meaning of self-quest against a particularly postmodern context.This thesis contains three major parts: introduction,body,and conclusion.The introduction part includes a sketch of Paul Auster’s literary status and The Book of Illusions,literature review,the theoretical perspective,thesis statement and structural layout.The body part is composed of four chapters.The first chapter discusses the signs of self-reference,including language signs and identity signs.The second chapter mainly sheds light on the narrative perspective.The first focus is the shifting narrative perspectives and the Two-I’s Difference causes narrative tension.The second focus is the cinematic narrative as an experimental literary creation of Auster.The cinematic narrative guides readers to perceive the text from certain perspective.The third chapter discusses the narrative stratification and the mutual reference among fiction,film,and reality.All those stories of different levels compose a song of self.The communication between different levels is essentially an embodiment of meta-narrative in that the inter-level communication breaks the boundary and reveals the novel’s fictionality.The fourth chapter revolves around each character’s self-quest with upward and downward reduction put by Norbert Wiley.Further,it indicates that self-quest comes from fictionality and indeterminacy in a postmodern world.The last part is a conclusion.With the analysis of the narrative self in The Book of Illusions,this thesis explores the identity crisis and illusionary condition of life in a postmodern world.