PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

 

e-ISSN 2231-8534
ISSN 0128-7702

Home / Regular Issue / JSSH Vol. 27 (4) Dec. 2019 / JSSH-3869-2018

 

Beyond Paul Auster’s Postmodernity: Dialogical Dimensions of the Self in Auster’s Oracle Night (2003)

Forough Barani and Hanita Hanim Ismail

Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities, Volume 27, Issue 4, December 2019

Keywords: Bakhtin, dialogical self, fictional positioning, literary theory, Paul Auster, postmodern self

Published on: 18 December 2019

The present research looks into Paul Auster’s intriguing novel Oracle Night and initiates a metaphorical journey deep inside the architectural world of the postmodern self of his protagonist, Sidney Orr. Employing the “Virtual Fictional/ Factual Positioning” (VFP) theoretical framework, this article relates the experience of uncertainty as a central mode in the postmodern self and aims to establish whether Orr develops a dialogical self which, according to Hubert Hermans’ Dialogical Self Theory (DST), functions as a more developed self in the present era of globalization and cross-cultural movements. The findings indicate that Orr’s dialogical attempt is having positive affects which, in the end, are beneficial for the psychological health of his whole self-system.