Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark: A Journey Through Memory and Imagination
Paul Auster’s *Man in the Dark*: A Journey Through Memory and Imagination
August Brill, a 72-year-old retired and widowed man, is recovering from a car accident that shattered his leg. This is the story that begins Paul Auster’s *Man in the Dark*. Brill’s hospital stay lasted a year. Upon his release, he moved to his daughter’s house in Vermont, where he is also accompanied by his granddaughter. Both women are without their male partners: their men have either left or died. Therefore, both have had to learn to live with this enforced solitude. After his hospital stay, the old man is sedentary, practically invalid in a wheelchair. He spends long hours in bed, sleepless, soothing himself by telling stories.
He invents the lives of others, attributing facts, planning routes, and putting them in trouble. These are tricks that allow him to kill time so that time does not kill him. But those stories are also instructive entertainment: by being in the shoes of others in circumstances he has not lived, he learns from the reactions of others. He finds out what a man like him would do in this situation.
The Power of Storytelling
“The night is still young, and without moving from the bed, staring into the darkness, a darkness so impenetrable that I cannot see the ceiling, I began to remember the story I started last night,” he says. He can act like a God who takes and makes, speeding up or delaying times, shortening or prolonging them. He works as a novelist, certainly, and he is. In fact, this old man knows the tricks of the creators: for many years, he has been a literary critic.
So, he wants to embarrass someone. What is the way to embarrass someone? There are numerous possibilities for spoiling a human life: one of the most effective, from a narrative point of view, is to make you sick from partial amnesia.
A Parallel Reality
Imagine, for example, a 30-year-old named Owen Brick, a professional magician with a settled life, with risk-free security and acceptable prosperity. He lives in New York. Suddenly, the individual, for whom everything seemed to fit, for whom things had a consistent meaning, wakes up at the bottom of a well dressed in a military uniform, specifically a cape. We later find out that he is in Wellington, Massachusetts. He has not forgotten who he is: he knows his life, but he does not know what he is doing there in an American nightmare, a war of which he is a part.
Of course, Brill, arbitrary as a writer, plays with his creatures. The well is a metaphor for life, true, but it is also an asphyxiating fact: a narrow, cramped space that drowns. Getting out of there is necessary to survive and take revenge on those who have committed such villainy. Brill wakes him up at that site, in this pit, in the worst conditions, “without papers, or a plate, or identification showing his military status.” From there begins an unusual circumstance for the character and a challenge for his creator, for this August Brill who suffers from insomnia.
The Nature of Memory
We remember what we were when we were young, when we were strong, when we were beautiful. Moreover, we remember embellished, making us better than we actually were. In the report, there is some truth, but these recollections are also reconstructive surgery: we remember anyone better than they really were.