Incredulity of Grand-Narratives: Dystopic, Alternative, and Suppressed Narratives in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark

Abstract

Paul Auster habitually uses multiple narrative structures in his novels and situates the reader in a mesh of narratives in which neither a real narrator is discerned nor the protagonist’s identity is distinguishable. In Man in the Dark, Auster uses two dystopic narrative lines in the novel with undistinguished characters’ identity to question the credulity of grand-narrative. In Lyotard’s theory of postmodernism, credulity of grand narratives is questioned since it disregards different voices in the novels. Brill and Brick are one character but with two functions in the novel. Brill tells a story consciously and tries to recreate a self-made story about Brick who is a semi-fabricated story of Brill who tries to deconstruct alternative America, though political decisions were different. The idea of dystopia, identity confusion, and temporal and spatial confusion in the novel reveals the possibility of a narration in one way or the other. Temporally, the past and present are connected through reinterpretations and imaginations which disproves the credulity of narratives in the present novel. Auster constructs and deconstructs identities and narratives in American setting and implies that most of the unspoken and suppressed aspects of narratives reduce the credulity of grand-narratives.