Study of the Fragmented Structure in Oracle Night as a Metafiction

Paul Auster is one of America’s most inventive and original postmodernist writers, whose novels have received worldwide popularity. His new piece Oracle Night was written in 2003 when the literary postmodernism has become a prominent literary tendency and when metafiction has been a typically postmodernist writing model. This thesis aims to study metafictional structural features of Paul Auster’s Oracle Night, which has not been given due critical attention to both in China and in foreign countries. Based on detailed textual analysis, the study contends that Oracle Night holds the structural feature as a metafiction by attempting to explore the representative one, namely, the Fragmented Structure exploited in this novel. The author of the thesis illustrates fragmented structure in the following aspects, that is, Fragmentation of Plots, Fragmentation of time and space, Fragmentation of characters, etc. Lastly, she analyzes the function of Fragmented structure.