Aspects of Mediation: Deceit, Desire, and Post-postmodernity in Paul Auster’s The Locked Room

Paul Auster’s The Locked Room concludes the 1985 New York Trilogy. In all three parts the main characters are ordinary people who act like detectives in a game of incessant, life-challenging hypotheses. The Locked Room’s narrator’s life is mediated and haunted by the hunting for a disappeared friend. The accentuated presence of patterns of mediation in the novel invites an introductory reading of the notion and role of mediation in literary structure, following René Girard’s 1961 analysis of mediation in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. This study further aims to highlight the novel’s contemporaneous importance by exploring the reach of the concept of mediation in the present, post-postmodern moment. The narrator’s life is examined here as a harbinger and example of the modus vivendi of the twenty-first century, one governed by digital mediation, effacement, and surveillance. In The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture post-postmodern scholar Zara Dinnen asks “how do we work with or move on from our mediated subjectivity?” In The Locked Room, the narrator’s cognizant awareness of his existential conundrum seems to mark an initial point of departure from mediation and a key achievement in this struggle.