THE LOCALIZED HERO AND ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM IN THE MUSIC OF CHANCE BY PAUL AUSTER

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Paul Auster is a prominent American novelist, critic and poet; he was a Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for his novel, The Music of Chance. This book’s protagonist, Jim Nashe, is an ex-fireman who has left his job and family to drive around the country and to earn money while running out of money. He and his friend named Pozzi found wounded on the motorway by him decide to gamble to make money easily; yet they are trapped in a house and forced to make a “wailing” wall because of their gambling debts for their losing. On the other hand because Jim was a vagabond before his enslavement, Auster invokes Thomas Nashe’s picaresque novel, The Unfortunate Traveller. Critics allegorically address Jim’s home confinement from both spiritual and physical perspectives.

The Music of Chance deals with a sense of meaningless in modern life. Oberman sees Jim “in an existential confrontation with his own freedom” (192). He continues to say that modern people stick “within the culture of late capitalism” (192). In fact, Jim Nashe is a traditional American picaro who “forsakes his family ties, breaks from the past, and seeks to re-create himself through the freedom of the open road” (Shiloh, and Auster, 492). In this sense, Auster blends the history into modern American life which is focused on the same problems and contradictions in life. It is a kind of fall of American dream

Jim’s ethnic and cultural foundations inform his behaviors. An ethnic Jew, Auster illustrates the suffering of Holocaust survivors. Jim Nashe’s experiences are similar to those of Jews in the Holocaust or the Pogroms. He lives in a space that limits his freedom; he prefers death to living this way. The same characteristics of protagonist/writer offer a sophisticated plot for readers. Because the reader must know both the writer’s life and novel’s witty nuance. In this study, we examine Jim’s incarceration and the reasons for it.