Both Ghosts and The Locked Room rely on a number of allusions to other works of literature. For this posting, read either Henry David Thoreau's "Solitude" (a chapter from Walden) or Samuel Johnson's Rambler #60 (an essay on the uses of biography). After reading, comment on how the text in question relates to any issues raised in The New York Trilogy. (You'll see that Thoreau compliments Ghosts and Johnson compliments The Locked Room.)
Here are links to the texts:
Johnson: http://www.samueljohnson.com/ram60.html
Johnson: http://www.samueljohnson.com/ram60.html
This post will remain open until the beginning of class this Thursday.
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Johnson’s Rambler #60 provides insight into the quest of the narrator in The Locked Room to create a biography on his childhood friend. The protagonist finds it difficult to obtain not an accurate account, but an account of Fanshawe that would “pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, where exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and by virtue.” As Johnson writes. Yet at the same time, the protagonist finds difficulty in obtaining this information, furthermore the biography he is attempting to write is in a way autobiographical. Both him and Fanshawe shared the same backyard, the same childhood memories, and at different points the same wife and child. Johnson talks about the ability or lack thereof of a writer to place the reader into the head of the person being written about. This lies at the heart of the protagonist’s problem and can best be seen during the protagonist’s recollection of Fanshawe’s tv box that only Fanshawe was allowed into. The box, which contained Fanshawe’s own thoughts and imagination was limited to Fanshawe. Fanshawe’s thoughts, though the experiences were shared with the protagonist, remain alien. Thus without knowing how Fanshawe felt, the protagonist is unable to put himself in the shoes of his childhood friend.
ReplyDelete-Alex Borghard
In Auster's Ghosts, both Blue and Black read Thoreau's Walden. The chapter “Solitude” comes to aptly reflect the experiment on which Blue and Black embark. They isolate themselves to their respective rooms and purely observe the world around them with the eyes of a chronicler, just as Thoreau does in observing the occurrences around Walden, to the point where he can “tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left.” However, Thoreau's attempt at isolation is in order to experiment with self-reliance and to gain freedom from the materialistic world around him. Blue and Black, on the other hand, have no such motives. Indeed, Blue realizes that the experiment has not followed Thoreau's plans for self-reliance when he discovers he has become a ghost to the world, losing all that was important to him in his past and, rather than becoming self-reliant, depending completely on the person across the street, who had come to define his life. Thoreau is able to keep “well, serene, contented” due to the simple beauties of nature that surround him. Blue and Black, however, have nothing to content them, ruining their attempts at self-reliance.
ReplyDelete-James Fang
Good work -- post closed.
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