Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "auster"
4 3 2 1
You’re a writer. Your novel has a protagonist. Let’s call him or her “Chris”. You can’t let Chris die before the end, or your novel ends prematurely. If you write genre fiction, you may not even be able to allow Chris a cosy or bitter retirement. I’ve had fun with this trope here: http://www.thewriteroomblog.com/the-o...
The traditional answer is to invent ghosts, haunting and other flights of fancy. In his latest novel, “4 3 2 1”, Paul Auster, who rejects supernatural slight-of-hand, hits on an effective writerly solution. He has four chronological sections, and one chapter in each section is devoted to a specific protagonist,, in the same order. When Auster bumps off one of his protagonists, he nevertheless keeps his place in the next section, but his chapter consists only of the heading and a blank text – a stark reminder of the character’s death and all the unfulfilled potential that has died with it.
It is a masterful ploy, even when Auster repeats it, though it has less impact the second time. When he kills his third protagonist, he uses a contrasting strategy, letting you imagine him merely falling asleep, until, in the final pages of the novel, the authorial voice tells you the character had died in his sleep. This leaves you just with the fourth, most Austerial protagonist, who is, to me, the stodgiest and least interesting of the quartet.
You can see a brilliant visual way of refusing to forget the dead in Richard Lester’s satirical film “How I Won The War”. You may remember it for featuring John Lennon as a non-singing actor. It shows a bedraggled band of British soldiers on a mission toward the end of WWII. Every time one of them is killed, a wraith-like version of him, not intended as a ghost and not haunting anyone, still appears in the line-up, reminding us of his premature death and its enduring importance.
The traditional answer is to invent ghosts, haunting and other flights of fancy. In his latest novel, “4 3 2 1”, Paul Auster, who rejects supernatural slight-of-hand, hits on an effective writerly solution. He has four chronological sections, and one chapter in each section is devoted to a specific protagonist,, in the same order. When Auster bumps off one of his protagonists, he nevertheless keeps his place in the next section, but his chapter consists only of the heading and a blank text – a stark reminder of the character’s death and all the unfulfilled potential that has died with it.
It is a masterful ploy, even when Auster repeats it, though it has less impact the second time. When he kills his third protagonist, he uses a contrasting strategy, letting you imagine him merely falling asleep, until, in the final pages of the novel, the authorial voice tells you the character had died in his sleep. This leaves you just with the fourth, most Austerial protagonist, who is, to me, the stodgiest and least interesting of the quartet.
You can see a brilliant visual way of refusing to forget the dead in Richard Lester’s satirical film “How I Won The War”. You may remember it for featuring John Lennon as a non-singing actor. It shows a bedraggled band of British soldiers on a mission toward the end of WWII. Every time one of them is killed, a wraith-like version of him, not intended as a ghost and not haunting anyone, still appears in the line-up, reminding us of his premature death and its enduring importance.
