Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies A night of eating and drinking - "I'm not talking" - "inside your dreams"

Résumé du document

What we have here is an extract form the novel The Brooklyn Follies, written by Paul Auster and published in 2005. Here, we are in the 1st half of the novel and 3 characters are present: Tom, Nathan and Harry. Nathan, the main character of the book, is Tom's uncle, and Harry is Tom's employer. The scene is set in a French restaurant in Brooklyn, and as the title indicates, they are eating and drinking. We can also indentify that the passage is written as a play, maybe to put the emphasis on speech. Indeed, although they seem to be having fun, they are talking about serious matters such as the human conditions. So we may wonder in what ways the passage is representative of the whole novel.

Extraits

[...] The Christian Right is a movement that developed both in South and West of the US. Maybe, he criticizes their oppositions as the abortion, the gay rights, the divorce Then, he criticizes the young person who has money, that is to say the “yuppy generation” of the 80's when he says twentyyearolddotcommillionaires l.28. He refers to the possibility of making very quick and easy money by leading activities in relation to the rise of modern technology and the internet bubble. [...]

[...] We are not happier when we have a lot of useless TV channels. In the end, he denounces the selfishness of the Western countries as far as the developing countries are concerned. When he says world is starving to death and we don't lift a finger to help” l.32, he criticizes our individualism and egoism. So, they succeed in finding a solution: The Hotel Existence, an inner refuge which allows escaping and protecting yourself from the outside world. Indeed, Tom says can't take it anymore gentlemen. want l.33. [...]

[...] Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies A night of eating and drinking - “I'm not talking” “inside your dreams” What we have here is an extract form the novel The Brooklyn Follies, written by Paul Auster and published in 2005. Here, we are in the 1st half of the novel and 3 characters are present: Tom, Nathan and Harry. Nathan, the main character of the book, is Tom's uncle, and Harry is Tom's employer. The scene is set in a French restaurant in Brooklyn, and as the title indicates, they are eating and drinking. [...]

[...] Harry is the one who invents both the term and the place. The Hotel Existence is situated in our mind, in our imagination. Tom refers to the power of imagination. Imagination is necessary to survive because real escape from the society isn't possible. It's a way to carry on when it's too difficult. So the solution they have find is to escape the society they criticize by taking refuge in their imagination, in the Hotel Existence. To conclude, we can say that this extract is significant of the whole novel because we find the recurrent theme “from pessimism to optimism”, indeed, at the beginning, Tom wants out whereas at the end, they found a positive solution: the Hotel Existence. [...]