#lit322

While I was reading and attempting to decipher Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny,” I started to think about how it related to Paul Auster’s novel, “The New York Trilogy,” which pretty much celebrates the uncanny. Freud states that the uncanny is “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. [The uncanny is] something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. When experiencing the uncanny, the unknown appears as something which is – paradoxically – familiar (Freud 132). In Auster’s “New York Trilogy” the uncanny could refer to the doubling effect and the terror or uneasy feeling it causes the reader. In Ghosts, Blue spies on Black and as Blue’s uncanny similarities to Black become clearer throughout the story, both Blue and the reader start to feel a little confused and uncomfortable. He feels uneasy because he feels like he has seen Black somewhere before, but he can’t figure out where. As he spends hours every day doing nothing but watching Black, he starts to realize that he and Black are basically the same person, or doubles of one another. The uncanny is what makes this story so interesting, yet also quite disturbing.

I definitely liked this story the best of the three. It was fun to see the connections and to feel like you are searching for Fanshawe along with the author. This story felt very psychological to me (i.e. the locked room in the narrator’s mind) and as psychology is my major, this story became much more interesting to me. However, it also frustrated me. I really do not like books that don’t have a definitive answer, and Auster is all about not giving an answer. Cliffhangers drive me nuts. I don’t want to make up  my own ending, I want to know what actually happens (and by actually I mean in the author’s fictional world...I know it’s fiction.) I did like trying to decipher who was who between the three stories. In class, for my presentation, I did not even touch upon the characters from Ghosts, as I am still so confused by that story. While I did enjoy the last story, I am so frustrated with the entire book and will definitely stay away from mystery novels for a while.