ORACLE NIGHT: A BAKHTINIAN READING OF PAUL AUSTER’S METAFICTIONAL NARRATIVE

Abstract

This paper intends to discuss Paul Auster’s Oracle Night (2003) first as a metafictional   narrative, concerned with its status as fiction, narrative and language, but also grounded in a verifiable historical reality; employing traditional forms and expectations and the same time undermining them; challenging the fixing of boundaries between genres, while asserting itself as a novel. Nevertheless, due to these same characteristics, Oracle Night simultaneously inserts itself  back into what Bakhtin has called the serio-comic genres, and, specifically, into the genre of the Menippean satire. The characteristics of this genre, which impregnate Auster’s text, will thus project Oracle Night as a postmodern novel as a consequence of being a contemporary  Menippean satire, for, as Bakhtin stresses, the novel is the only developing genre that reflects reality itself in the process of its unfolding, in total affinity with our contemporary world and thus reinterpreting itself continually, in its constant trajectory as a genre at the vanguard of change.