“Forking Paths” as a principle for constructing the hero’s path: variations in P. Auster’s “City of Glass”

Abstract

The author examines the principle of constructing the hero's path in an early novel by the contemporary writer Paul Auster. In “City of Glass” Auster has already undertaken the problematization of a more traditional narrative form: he pays increasing attention not so much to constructing events that actually happen to the hero, as to pointing out events that could have happened, but did not happen within the narrative world. Such work with the event fits Auster's narrative search into an extensive tradition that problematizes possible worlds in the narrative in its own way. One of the techniques for creating such possible worlds is disnarration, which allows - due to indications of a possible alternative development of events - to create possible worlds within the narrative and even turn them into counterfactual ones. Feeling an interest in this problematic, Auster in his early novel also creates the path of his hero on the principle of variations - consistently presenting to the reader those paths that the hero could have followed, but which nevertheless remained unrealized in his life. This is how Auster in the narrative comprehends the idea of Borges' “forking paths”, simultaneously responding to the cinematic narrative experiments that were undertaken by directors in the second half of the 20thcentury. In this way he consistently develops his own narrative experiment, because several decades after the “City of Glass”, the principle of “forking paths” will be fully embodied in his novel in “4321” not only at the level of character construction, but at the level of the entire narrative structure, which therefore can be defined as forking-path narrative.

Keywords

• disnarration
• possible worlds
• variations