Echoes of American Romance in Paul Auster's Postmodern Narrative

The romance as a literary form was most suitable narrative genre for early nineteenth-century fiction writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose object of fictionwriting was to seek neutral territory between Actual and Imaginary, and fantasy. To him as well as other contemporary romancers, romance was not means to escape oppressive into a fanciful fairy-land, but rather a form of narrative to present other possibilities of more or truth lurking everyday life by giving latitude of imagination and blending it with than which novel would claim to represent. The unpardonable sin for a romancer, as Hawthorne claimed, was thus not to indulge his imagination or fiction, which was also harshly denounced America at time, but to swerve aside truth of human heart. It seems works of Paul Auster, one of most popular writers today, shows much resonance with this narrative form of conservative romance, to cite definition by Michael Bell for distinguishing it from Jamesean radical romance, when he insists arguing for of his fiction that [e] ven though situations aren't strictly realistic, they might follow some realistic psychology. (The Red Notebook, 109) Auster regards himself as a realist in strictest sense of word, but his sense of seems less based on physical than psychological plausibility. In whatever way he may commit himself to fictional realism, Auster is usually designated as a representative of postmodern writers he is very conscious of fictionality of fiction a contemporary world where boundary between and fiction itself is obscured by developments technology and science and appearance of virtual reality they constitute. The collapse of reliable boundaries is thus a characteris· tic of our time when system of values or beliefs we esteemed as essential for our understanding world and ourselves is suspected to be just an assembly of man's or a fiction. Hence Lyotard's epoch-making announcement of the crisis of narratives as valid unifying systems. Such is unstable of our contemporary world Auster may well insist his works are realistic however mysterious, bizarre