Abstract:

In the Country of Last Things: A Historical Memory of the HolocaustGAO Limin
(School of Foreign Studies, Shanghai Lixin University of Commerce, Shanghai 201620, China)Abstract： Paul Auster (1947 ) is regarded as one of the best American Jewish writers of the age. He gained renown for The New York Trilogy, and after that he published In the Country of Last Things (1987). In In the Country of Last Things, Auster makes up an enclosed and segmented city, constituting a space of the great confinement. World War Ⅱghettos provide the prototype of “the country of last things”. In the space of confinement, Auster combines the madeup geographical landscape with the historical facts of the Holocaust, constructing a city of fact and fiction, which reflects the sad plight of Jews in World War II ghettos. And the fundamental cause of Jews’ sufferings is the atrocity committed by antiSemites. With the despotic power exercised over Jews by antiSemites, Jews’ hope to restore order by space image can only fail to illusion. Auster’s examination of the Holocaust in his literary writing manifests his memory to Jewish history and identity.

Key words: In the Country of Last Things, the Holocaust, space of the great confinement, despotic power, Paul Auster