Irony in The Locked Room: A Biographer Searching for His Own Identity

『잠긴 방』의 아이러니: 자신의 정체성을 탐구하는 전기 작가

Paul Auster's The Locked Room, the third novel of The New York Trilogy, has been examined by many critics in terms of anti-detective fiction or postmodernism. However, this paper focuses upon how the author adopts and utilizes some key elements of the traditional detective novel and its literary tradition. Mystery storytelling is one of Auster's literary strategies and the theme of the double is another. For his novel Auster explores the theme of the double as in Poe's "William Wilson." In The Locked Room, the narrator "I" is described as a shadow of his childhood friend Fanshawe. After Fanshawe's disappearance "I" becomes a literary agent for his friend, and becomes a husband of his friend's wife and a father of his friend's child. Searching for information to write a biography of his friend, he realizes that his friend has always been living inside his skull condemned to a mystical solitude. When Fanshawe appears in the narrator's mind as an image of the door of a locked room, the locked room is also a metaphor for the closed consciousness of the narrator. In his strategy of mystery storytelling, Auster employs the quest of detective fiction as well as the irony of Oedipus the King, where the criminal pursued by the king turns out to be himself. The Locked Room starts with the mystery of Fanshawe's disappearance, and as the novel develops, the narrator pursues numerous clues about his biographical subject like a private eye. Ironically, however, he finds that the ghost of Fanshawe has always been with him and that this is inevitable. As the narrator resolves to quit his life as a double, he contrives to name a strange man Fanshawe as if he tries to turn his biographical subject into a fictional character in the same way Fanshawe has controlled the narrator like a character in Fanshawe's novel. Beaten by the fictional Fanshawe and recovering from a near-death experience, the narrator prepares for his final showdown with Fanshawe. The transcendence of his existence as a double is epitomized by his act to tear off the red notebook handed to him by Fanshawe, which confusingly delivers a message that a life is doomed to be a failure. The narrator's act to cut off Fanshawe's influence bespeaks his breaking out of his locked consciousness and a new start for his life with his own identity.