A DOCUMENT PAUL AUSTER’S NEW YORK TRILOGY

The article deals with the way a literary work “creates” a document out of itself, on the example of Paul Auster’s novels. A document here is the report of a character, a private detective who is watching another character (a writer) but also the book of a fictional writer who is writing a story of the detective who is watching him, and eventually the book about this whole story. In this case, the search for the other, watching him, is inevitably associated with the search for oneself, self-observation. Biography becomes autobiography, e.g. a document rather than a narrative based on a document. This story becomes projected on the story of Don Quixote (of which “some” Paul Auster, a fictional writer, is writing an essay). The Other is a landmark in the vast desert of fictional worlds where Paul Auster’s Don Quixote wanders alongside other characters of the trilogy. The author may not return from his endless journey through imaginary worlds; his life does not belong to either real life or fiction. He gives life to his characters while remaining invisible himself. Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy explores such existential situation where the only evidence of the author’s life is a document left by his character. The author leaves a documentary record of a kind about his own existence. It this sense, literature is a document of life and of the endless search for a reason to the existence of an individual who, being not equal to him- or herself, is always the other and never a type or a template