Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things (1987) departs significantly in style
and content from other works in his oeuvre for a variety of reasons. To begin with,
it is the first and only novel in the author’s canon that represents the adventurous journey of a female protagonist, who in turn is a noteworthy and unique predecessor to the female characters appearing in Auster’s later works. Notably, more often than not, Auster’s female protagonists are characters who display remarkable poise and courage under even the most trying circumstances. These characters, however, whether it is Virginia Stillman from Auster’s The New York Trilogy (1986), Mrs. Witherspoon and Mother Sioux from Mr. Vertigo (1994), Grace Orr from Oracle Night (2003), or Gwyn Walker from Invisible (2009), while greatly admirable, usually have peripheral roles in the plots of Auster’s novels, functioning usually as observers or aides helping the male protagonist in his quest through life. In general, the narratives in Auster’s works, with the exception of In the Country of Last Things, neither engage with the woman’s journey nor do they make it central to the plot. More important, this novel can also be distinguished from the rest of the works in Auster’s oeuvre because it is written in the epistolary form and specifically highlights a dystopic landscape that echoes the horrors of the Holocaust. Given the uniqueness of In the Country of Last Things, the present paper argues that the novel’s epistolary-adventure narrative, revolving around a central female protagonist, inverts conventional quest motifs surrounding male heroic figures in literature. At the same time, it also replaces traditional grand narratives of masculinized heroism with an alternative discourse stemming from feminized modes of adventure, survival, and resilience.
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