Ghosts by Paul Auster

    In the mystery novel "Ghosts" by Paul Auster. My thought from the beginning of the book was that it was going to be a confusing read with all the character names, but in actuality it was a novel of false leads, ambiguous clues, and uncertainty. First, theirs Blue who is a private eye trained by Brown. Then, theirs White who hired Blue to investigate a man named Black on Orange Street. Blue finds the whole case a mystery, but he does it because he needs the work, and so he listens. Blue is watching the right person we know. Only we know less about why he is watching Black. Blue watches Black out the window from his apartment and writes reports to White, hoping that he is focusing on the most relevant information. "The problem for Blue is that Black simply writes, reads, eats, takes brief strolls through the neighborhood." (18) Black's routine is predictable and seemingly tedious.

    Blue not doing well with the boredom starts going out and meets a woman named, Violet at the bar, and begins some sort of "relationship" with her. Although, he has a future Mrs. Blue in his life "he justifies these sessions with Violet by comparing himself to a soldier at war in another country, every man needs a little comfort, especially when his number could be up tomorrow." (43)
The future Mrs. Blue has moved on with her life, and why shouldn't she ? She has not heard from or seen Blue within the year. Blue runs into the future Mrs. Blue on one of his strolls to Manhattan, on the arm of another man. "Blue is so at a loss that he doesn't know whether to bend his head farther down and hide his face or stand up and greet the woman whom he now understands will never be his wife."(49)

    I think Blue feels betrayed by both Black and the ex future Mrs. Blue. It's almost as if Black is making a mockery out of Blue. There seems to be many hidden meanings in the novel from the character names, to identity, and who the self is. One thing is certain: Blue is an author through and through. He tosses Thoreau’s Walden aside as worthless. Who would go live in a forest where there’s nothing to write about, we hear Blue think, as we pity his inability to define himself through anything but his characters. As Black and Blue idly sit and script each other’s lives, the reader can’t help but feel a sense of loneliness descend upon this closed, difficult, two-person world. Are they simply alter egos, or are they author and character (and which one plays which)? By the end, we wonder whether Auster summed up the difficulties of writing best by the way he named his characters: what’s harder for any author to describe than “blue”?


    What I didn't like about the novel was I found the ending unclear or incomplete. It left me with a lot of uncertain questions: Is Black and White the same person ? Because when Blue breaks into Black's apartment "he gathers up the papers with his free hand, saying to himself it doesn't matter, this will be a start, and then makes his way to the door". Blue picks up the papers he has stolen, hoping to distract himself from these thoughts, and there they are, one after the other, the weekly accounts, all spelled out in black and white, meaning nothing, saying nothing, as far from the truth of the case as silence would have been. Blue groans when he sees them, sinking down deep within himself, and then in the face of what he finds there, begins to laugh, at first faintly, but with growing force, louder and louder, until he is gasping for breath, almost choking on it, as though trying to obliterate himself once and for all". (85)

   “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.” To which Blue responds, “Another ghost.” (66) hence the title.