Notes on/in Paul Auster's “Oracle Night”

Abstract

Oracle Night, Paul Auster's twelfth novel, is analysed focusing on the author's peculiar paraftextual choices. Drawing on Gerard Genette's seminal grammar of the paratext, Seuils, Auster's usage of the title, the dedication and especially of footnotes is here explored as a means to understand some aspects of postmodern referentiality and textual self-sufficiency, such as the relationship between the code of the real and the code of the fictional and the pact with the reader.