INTERTEXTUALITY IN PAUL AUSTER’S NEW YORK TRILOGY

Abstract

The history of humankind is inseparable from the history of art; literary works have always told the story of human condition and progress. For this reason, intertextuality, which attempts to make connections between multiple texts as well as texts and their historical, social and cultural contexts, has become a crucial theory in literature although being a relatively new one. The main source of this study, The New York Trilogy by American author Paul Auster, combining three elaborate short novels, City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room, proves to be a very compatible work for intertextual theories. Seemingly, all three novels are detective stories in which the protagonists face the danger of losing their own identities while they are after some mysterious characters. Nevertheless, the novels offer a whole range of perspectives for the reader with their unusual depth of characters, subtle uses of language, repetitive patterns and rich allusions which make it impossible to overlook the fact that the process of writing is a common theme in all three of them. It is actually so dominant that the reader may feel as though all the confusion and agony suffered by the detectives were for the sake of writing itself. This study proposes that The New York Trilogy is Auster’s homage to the art of writing, depending upon the Intertextual theories and numerous works of great writers that are vital to the novels. Thus, many important theorists such as Saussure, Bakhtin, Barthes, Barth, Bloom, Eliot, Kristeva and Hutcheon will be referred to as well as plentiful intertexts alluded by the author in an attempt to make a rightful intertextual analysis of the novel.