Self-Dispersal and Self-Help: Paul Auster’s Second Person

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes Auster’s employment of the second person in his twenty-first-century prose texts – Invisible, Sunset Park, Winter Journal and Report from the Interior – in order to challenge familiar humanistic readings of his work. Using theories of second-person narration, these texts are read with reference to other works that use the second person, including Ben Lerner’s 10:04, to argue that they can be seen to offer a vision of selfhood commensurate with neoliberal ideals of self-reliance and self-reinvention. Understanding these recent texts in this way, it is argued, demands a reappraisal of Auster’s oeuvre: the traditional readings of his work as describing a never-ending struggle to meet the other, to escape isolation, must stand alongside an alternative reading of his work which emphasizes a continual restaging of individual authority. Thus, the article makes an important intervention in discussions of Auster’s work, as well as making claims about the ethics and politics of literary form with wider implications for the contemporary moment.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank two colleagues at Keele University – Jonathon Shears and Tim Lustig – for their forensic reading of earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a recent example, see Álvarez, María Laura Arce. Paul Auster’s Ghosts: The Echoes of European and American Tradition. Lanham: Lexington, 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Peacock

James Peacock is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatures at Keele University, UK. He is the author of Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Global Community in a Global Age (Bloomsbury 2015) and is currently researching contemporary fictions of gentrification.