It is theself-reflectivity of the author as the representation of the identity and itscrisis, which is the focus of this study. This thesis’s purposes are to analyzethe abovementioned key terms in the context of the story to approach it throughthe post-modern theories about identity; and see that there is no identity,specifically related to us as human beings based on the modern reading of thisnovel.
Furthermore, it wants to say how shattered and multilayered ourpersonality is. There would be an existential reading for this notion in thestory, too. All meta-fiction, inter-textuality, and self-reflexivity in theform and style of the novel are techniques of post-modern writings to highlightand discuss the clashed identities in people.
. Moreover, the novels are allexamples of detective mysteries. All of them are complicated but at the sametime attractive to the reader. We see names are interchangeably and repeatedlyused instead of other names.
The author in a self-reflexive way uses his realname or repeating others in the different part of the novel. Then as we gofurther, we are doppelgangers of the characters in each volume. In general,Auster plays with names to challenge the audiences and invites them to dealwith the concept of shattered and clashed identities. On the Transition fromModernity to Postmodernity Transformations in Culture of preliterate culture,as evidenced in mass television viewing and virtually communal forms ofinteraction and information dissemination (for example, the Internet).
This issuggestive of an evolutionary reversal to structural features of an earlier,more collectivized mode of identity formation and cultural existence, capturedin Marshall McLuhan’s sentient term the “global village.” Paradoxically, whilehigh-tech mass culture personalizes and privatizes modes of identity formation,it simultaneously collectivizes the forms, sources, and technical means of thisprocess. The result is a global mélange of electronic communities—ofinformation, entertainment, trade, and politics—that have completely shatteredboth private and public space as these have been historically understood. Tounderstand postmodernity as cultural transformation and excess, it is necessaryto dig more deeply into the modern-to-postmodern transition, tracing theunderlying connections between these cultural types.
