Paul Auster has observed that his novels follow a pendular rhythm in which a complex, labyrinthine book is followed by one that is simple in its construction.The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace and Leviathan are all narrated in a complex manner and contain numerous stories within their intricate plots, whereas In The Country of Last Things and The Music of Chance are characterised by a movement towards lessness. They are what Auster would call ‘bare bone narratives’, simple stories told in a straightforward manner. This chapter, ‘Austerities’, as the title suggests, considers the place of these ascetic narratives in Auster's œuvre. The most pronounced intertextual presences here are the writings of Beckett, Kafka and Knut Hamsun, while the fairy-tale and the parable are the genres that provide a starting point for Auster's fiction. However, the pendular rhythm that the author identifies can also be detected within The New York Trilogy itself, not only in the second story, Ghosts, but also in the stripping down of traditional narrative forms (especially the detective novel) which takes place throughout the book. As I argued in the previous chapter, Auster negotiates his own position in relation to nineteenth-century American writing by causing the text to become a field of confrontation for the two opposing trends in the writings of that period. At the same time, though, his own position is also regulated by his reading of modernist literature, and the way it challenged Romantic assumptions as well as realist writing. Therefore, before I examine In the Country of Last Things and The Music of Chance, I remain with The New York Trilogy, this time reading it in relation to Samuel Beckett's Trilogy.

If Auster ever came close to experiencing the anxiety of influence, he must have felt it in relation to Beckett. In his own critical work he praises Beckett who, ‘Even at his not quite best… remains Beckett, and reading him is like reading no one else… Beckett is not like other writers… beyond Dickens and Joyce, there is perhaps no English writer of the past hundred years who has equalled Beckett's early prose for vigor and intelligence’ (AH 83–87).