Description
"Inside the Locked Room: Paul Auster and Edgar Allan Poe"The postmodern detective stories of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy signal their debt to the work of Edgar Allan Poe with the use in the first story, City of Glass, of the name William Wilson (following after Poe’s short story “William Wilson”), and with the title of the third story, The Locked Room (recalling the riddle posed in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by those deaths which occur in a room “locked, with the keys inside”). The end result of Auster’s simultaneous engagement with both the concept of the doppelgänger and of the sealed space is that scene in The Locked Room where the narrator communicates with his double, Fanshawe, who, from within the locked room, speaks “so close that I felt as if the words were being poured into my head” to say “I’m already dead.”
This paper argues that Auster here reveals how the locked room is inseparable from those other, deathly, sealed spaces in Poe’s work, the tomb, the pit, the crypt, the coffin, the cellar wall. Moreover, this closed space, though inaccessible, yet authors that which surrounds it, through the figure of the double. In this way, it becomes apparent that “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” contains two, interlocking, locked rooms, the scene of the crime and the scene of the investigation where, in a room which “admitted no visitors,” the mystery of the murder is recounted in a way which reflects also on the relationship between the narrator and his own double, Dupin. Poe’s “Bi-Part Soul,” it will be suggested, sees two parts of the same self standing either side of a locked door, meaning, as Auster writes, “No one can cross the boundary into another - for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.”
| Period | 2007 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Limerick, IrelandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Paul Auster
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Detective Fiction
- Doppelgängers
- Locked Room Mysteries