Reading Response 10/27

Reading Response 10/27

Ghosts by Paul Auster is a novel set in New York City about a detective story focusing on mystery and deception. The protagonist in the novel is Blue, a detective who was hired by White to spy on a man named Black. When I first started reading this novel, it was difficult to understand the characters because they were described as colors. As I continued reading, it became easier and I was able to figure out what was going on. Blue was trained by Brown and is now running the organization because Brown retired. He accepts the job to follow Black without asking many questions, because he needs the work anyways. As the spying goes on, black does nothing but read and write and Blue gets bored with the assignment because there’s really nothing to do. Blue gets caught in the deception and is unable to walk away from the situation until the very end.

One thing I found interesting was the representation of time in the novel. Auster symbolizes time in an odd but interesting way. He states, “The place is New York, the time is the present, and neither one will ever change” (7). By stating that neither of the factors will ever change, we are nearly required to believe that time has either stopped, or it is fictional.

The title of this novel has a meaning and I was not able to find a connection until later on in the story. Auster states, “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" (66). I think the author is trying to show that when you write, you need to put yourself in the story even if its fiction. Writing can take over our lives and can help to the writer connect with other people. One day, Blue breaks into Black's apartment and discover that Black to also spying on someone and writing about it. Things come to a head and the title Ghosts begin to make sense. Throughout all the years of spying on Black, Blue was actually seeing a reflection of himself in Black. Black regulated every condition even though Blue wrote about him.