Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1. Past Paradigms
There is something strange about a cast of characters that comes in tetrads centering on duplicate yet different protagonists with identical names, and critics who argue that Auster’s mastodon novel, 4 3 2 1, marks a return to realism fail to take into account the inflated tone of the fabular woven...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses universitaires de Rennes
2020-06-01
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| Series: | Revue LISA |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/11459 |
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| Summary: | There is something strange about a cast of characters that comes in tetrads centering on duplicate yet different protagonists with identical names, and critics who argue that Auster’s mastodon novel, 4 3 2 1, marks a return to realism fail to take into account the inflated tone of the fabular woven into the texture of the narrative. Auster has worked with alternativity before, but 4 3 2 1 takes his penchant for unknowability to a new level. It installs a constitutive element of heterogeneity at the core of the text and sabotages readerly expectations. It would be far-fetched to argue that 4 3 2 1 forges a literary strategy, in which ‘myth’ and ‘the everyday’ converge, that is consonant with a new type of twenty-first century fiction which critics are currently at pains to define. |
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| ISSN: | 1762-6153 |