University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Studies AN ESSAY ON MAN IN THE DARK BY PAUL AUSTER Mia Gašparović Contemporary American Novel Dr. sc. Stipe Grgas June 2015 1. ABOUT PAUL AUSTER Paul Benjamin Auster was born on February 3rd, 1947. in Newark, New Jersey in the United States. Some of his novels include The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, Man in the Dark and The Brooklyn Follies. His earlier works may be regarded as detective stories which greatly deal with existential issues, questions of identity, language literature and so on, while his later works most usually deal with the search for identity and personal meaning whose heroes are often involved in someone else's larger-than-life schemes. Paul Auster is also known for writing poetry and screenplays and has won numerous literary awards over the decades. 2. MAN IN THE DARK Man in the Dark is a novel by Paul Auster published in 2008. The novel starts off with a seventy-two-year-old retired book critic, August Brill, who spends most of his nights lying in bed in the dark and telling stories to himself. The reason he does that is so he would not think about the recent death of his wife Sonia and the murder of his granddaughter’s boyfriend Titus. The novel exclusively revolves around one of Brill’s sleepless nights when he imagines a parallel world. In this parallel world, America is at war with itself and not Iraq and the twin towers in New York are still standing. However, in this Brill’s version of America, the 2000 election results led to secession, some of the states left the union and a civil war began. Every now and then, Brill makes an inadvertent digression from his story and reminisces about his late wife, his daughter and granddaughter. In the early hours, his granddaughter joins him and asks him to hear the story of her grandparents’ marriage. 3. LITERATURE AFTER 9/11 A blog post on www.economist.com says: ‘There are three important reasons why it is hard to write a good 9/11 novel. The first is that the attack on the World Trade Centre was such a huge and overpowering event that it often overshadows and dominates the fictional elements of a novel: literary novelists normally shy away from choosing such a big and unbelievable event as the backdrop to a story.’ That is true. The events that took place on 9/11 are hard to incorporate into a story so that they don’t take over the plot, but at the same time they have to be present and not ignored. What also makes it even more difficult is that, even though almost 14 years have passed, so many people are still extremely emotional and have their firm opinions on the events of 9/11. 4. USA IN THE DARK The first mention of the war happens on the page 8, when Brill’s imaginary character Brick suddenly wakes up in a different kind of America than he is used to, and the readers know nothing more than him. ‘What am I doing here? Brick asks, trying to suppress the anguish in his voice. Get a grip on yourself, boy. You're fighting a war. What did you think this was? A trip to Fun World? Whatwar? Does that mean we're in Iraq? Iraq? Who cares about Iraq?.