Author, father, president: Paul Auster's figures of invisibility

Since the mid-2000s, Paul Auster's fiction has increasingly come to address topical issues. Man in the Dark (2008) is a post-9/11 work, whose plot evolves around the attack on the World Trade Center and George W. Bush's controversial leadership. Yet, in this work, Auster also returns to several key themes that have preoccupied him since The Invention of Solitude (1982). When Man in the Dark's symbolic and veiled return to these themes is examined, the novel's political critique can be more richly understood within the context of the topoi of the father-son relationship and the construction/deconstruction of the self through writing.