Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy: Revisiting Self in the Merging Boundaries of Gothic and the Postmodern

Abstract

Inevitably wrought by the socio-historical context in which they occur, literary genres transform in the course of history, and gothic is not an exception. Since its rise in the late eighteenth century, the gothic genre has significantly evolved: from ruins, graveyards, and vampires to echoes of romantic imagination and towards gothic science-fiction. This study argues that gothic has renewed itself in the postmodern context, in the sense that the characteristic features of the genre as materialized in the supernatural are replaced with mysteries, terrors, and ghosts that haunt the contemporary self's inner mind. Thus a proliferation of vampires, doubles and ghosts has given way to the haunted vaults and obscure shadows within the characters' inner worlds. In particular, this paper addresses the concept of self and the postmodern gothic as reincarnated in Paul Austers' The New York Trilogy by relating the notion of 'self' to space, self-reflexivity, the uncanny, and doubles.