Moon Palace

Paul Auster (1947- )

1989

#travels, territories, frontiers

#roots & legacy
#exploration & adventure
#self-expression & self-construction
#self-representation
#expressing emotions
#self-staging

> How is a modern American mythology created in Paul Auster’s Moon Palace?

•Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947

•Jewish middle-class parents of Austrian descent
•Graduated from Columbia University with B.A and M.A. degrees in 1970
•Moved to Paris where he earned a living translating French literature
•Returned to the US in 1974
•Has published poems, essays and novels, as well as translations of French writers such
as Stéphane Mallarmé
•Acclaimed debut work: a memoir titled The Invention of Solitude (1982)
•Gained renown for a series of three loosely connected stories published collectively as
The New York Trilogy
•Recurring themes: search for identity and personal meaning, the relationships
between people and their peers and environment, coincidence, a sense of imminent
disaster, ascetic life, an obsessive writer as central character or narrator, loss of the
ability to understand, loss of money, depiction of daily and ordinary life, failure,
absent father, writing and storytelling, metafiction, intertextuality, American history,
American space
•Influences on Auster’s writing: Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, Henry David
Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne

The period in which the novel is written is the late sixties, more precisely
during the summer Man set foot on the moon (1969). The late sixties were
dominated by the Vietnam War and finally ended on a good note when the first
man landed on the moon. However, as the novel spans over three generations,
there are numerous references to the conquest of the West and the massacres
of Native Americans, references to Westerns, to a criticism of progress and
finally to the moon itself as being a cycle, so in deep contrast with progress
itself.