Historical realities in Paul Auster’s novel “4321”

Abstract

   The paper discusses the various methods Paul Auster employs to incorporate historical, social and political realities –invariably having an important role to play in all his works – into his recent novel “4321”, constructed as a genre fusion between a family saga and Bildungsroman. Whatever the narrator tells about his family is meticulously dated and referenced with the facts and flow of American history in the first half and the middle of the 20^th century. Auster explores various ways to combine documentary and fictional narratives. Thus, social and political context can be given occasionally as a summary list of newspaper headlines or as a diary kept by a reporter who witnesses and takes part in the described events, doing so either as a private citizen or as an accredited member of the press. The form of representation invariably offers highly personal perspectives on what is happening that multiply and come together to form a bigger picture of the world in action. Auster persistently emphasizes the fictional status of his work by casting characters from his previous novels as actual participants in historical events, demonstrating the important postmodernist concepts of inseparably entwined literature and reality, the blending of incompatibilities, the universality of Text and its game-playing modus.