Towards the end, the story settles on Brill and Katya rather than Brick, as the reader knew from the start that it must. Suddenly the real war in Iraq is invoked. This might be feeble or meretricious from a lesser author, but the parallel worlds of Auster’s conceit have by now suggested that whether America is at war with Iraq or itself, humans are primarily at war within themselves.
Deep inside himself [Brick] knows that he has been contaminated by his visit to the other world and that sooner or later everything will come to an end.
Yet even if this knowledge of a parallel world seems to unfit the ‘Man in the Dark’ for normal life, the stories that Brick, Brill and Katya tell themselves have an authority just by being thought, which will affect how they adapt themselves again to life. Brill says, ‘agonising as this mess can be, there’s poetry in it, too, as long as you can find the words to express it.’ But it is Auster’s assured handling of his images, as much as the economy of his language, that makes the redemption he offers persuasive.
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