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The locked room paul auster7/5/2023 The story begins with the protagonist receiving a letter from a childhood friend of his who he has not seen in years, which leads to the discovery that this man, named Fanshawe (the title of an autobiographical novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne) has now disappeared and left behind a trove of unpublished literary treasures. It is also the only book in the Trilogy where the protagonist is not given a name and where the story is told from a first person point of view, which emphasizes the greater control over the text that the character achieves by the end of the book. This story also features a detective as its protagonist, although he is a detective in a much looser sense of the word. The Locked Room takes it title from the popular detective fiction mystery of a dead body found in locked room with no other entrances, but, in keeping with the ideas presented in the first two books of The New York Trilogy, it is transformed into a metaphor about a character/reader's relationship to a text—a book becomes a locked room because of the character/reader's inability to escape the control of the author.
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