Auster’s The Locked Room (1986) presents a protagonist in a desperate quest for a lost character whose absence functions as the only significant storyline to which the narrative unfolds. Although, stylistically, the entire plot revolves around the disappeared Fanshawe, nowhere in the narrative can the reader identify with certainty any traces of his actual existence. Fanshawe never appears in the story, but all the characters and their lives centre firmly upon him, thereby creating the illusion that without his appearance their lives can never be fully restored nor can they make any real sense. Taking into account Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, this research tries to demonstrate that what Auster’s characters go through is living obsessively with a non-present inaccessible Fanshawe whose abrupt disappearance leaves no clue of his existence, but just a lost memory which haunts the characters’ deepest senses of reality. This claim especially strengthens itself in the end, when the reader finds out that it all has been Fanshawe’s plot to keep his family and friend in dark in order to completely vanish from the realm of the real.

Keywords: Auster; The Locked Room; Baudrillard; hyperreality; disappearance

DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2016-2202-14

Alexander, V. & Neethi, Srirupa Chatterjee. (2014). Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium as a Critique of the Hyperreal. The Explicator. Vol. 72(1) 53-56.

Auster, P. (1990). The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin.

Baudrillard, J. (1997). Objects, Images, and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Illusion. In N. Zurbrugg (Ed.). Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact (pp. 7-18). London: Sage Publications.

Baudrillard, J. (2001). Symbolic Exchange and Death. In M. Poster (Ed.). Selected Writings (pp. 119-148). California: Stanford University Press.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan press.

Baudrillard, J. (2009). The Vanishing Point of Communication. In D. B. Clarke et al. (Eds.). Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories (pp. 15-23). New York: Routledge.

Baudrillard, J. (2009). Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? Chris Turner (Trans.). London: Seagull Books.

Behrooz, N. & H. Pirnajmuddin. (2016). The Ridiculous Sublime in Don Delillo’s White Noise and Cosmopolis, GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies. Vol. 16(1), 183-197.

Donovan, C. (2005). Postmodern Counternarratives: Irony and Audience in the Novels of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, and Tim O'Brien. New York: Routledge.

Eckhard, P. (2011). Chronotopes of the Uncanny: Time and Space in Postmodern New York Novels, Paul Auster's »City of Glass« and Toni Morrison’s »Jazz«. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Habibi, S. J. (2013). Democracy as Simulacrum: Incredulity towards the Metanarrative of Emancipation in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. 3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies. Vol. 19(3), 127-

Hutcheon, L. (2003). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge.

Jahshan, P. (2003). Paul Auster's Specters. Journal of American Studies.

Vol. 37(3), 389-405.

Pawlett, W. (2007). Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality. New York: Routledge.

Russell, A. (1990). Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti-Detective Fiction. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Vol. 31(2), 71-84.

Smith, R. G. (Ed.). (2010). The Baudrillard Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woods, T. (2004). “Looking for Signs in the Air: Urban Space and the Postmodern in In the Country of Last Things.” In Harold Bloom (Ed.). Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Paul Auster (pp. 137-160). Philadelphia: Chelsea Publication.