1. A Skeleton Key to The Locked Room
Every detective story leaves clues, and the biggest clue to unlocking The
Locked Room is the locked room metaphor itself. Starting with the title of the
book, there are a myriad of references to locked rooms in its pages. In order to
unlock the layers of meaning behind the locked room, I will employ the
metaphor as a “skeleton key” to examine how it relates to the two primary
characters in the book: Fanshawe and the narrator. In doing so, I will show
how Auster uses the locked room metaphor as a symbol for the various ways
these characters engage in the search for self. Indeed, as Shiloh asserts, “The
Locked Room foregrounds the quest for the self, which is the central pursuit of
both its protagonists” (Shiloh 79).
Fanshawe’s locked rooms are employed on two levels: as a psychological
escape mechanism and as a metaphysical challenge to control his destiny. In
order to understand the ways in which the locked room operates for Fanshawe,
first we must examine the way he is depicted early in the novel and the way he
acts in response to his surrounding environment. This in turn will bring his
controlling, anti-heroic adult behavior into clearer focus.
Fanshawe is the hub around which The Locked Room turns. The opening
lines of the book illustrate this well: “It seems to me now that Fanshawe was
always there. He is the place where everything begins for me…” (Auster 195).
Thus, he dominates the story both in and behind the scenes. Further, he is
depicted, at least at first, as someone who is larger-than-life, cut in the mold of

2. an archetypical American hero. He is charismatic, aloof, good-looking, self-
effacing, morally upright, smart, athletic, and adventurous:
“Any one of these things would have been enough to give him
special status—but together they made him seem heroic, a child
who had been touched by the gods” (Auster 210).
For the supremely gifted Fanshawe, things come easy. According to the
narrator, "One had the impression that there was nothing he did not do well,
nothing he did not do better than everyone else" (Auster 214). But alongside
these gifts, there is a restless side to Fanshawe:
“Behind all the surface composure, there seemed to be a great
darkness: an urge to test himself, to take risks, to haunt the edges
of things” (Auster 214).
This adventurousness is an integral part of Fanshawe’s personality and drives
him to, in his words, “taste life” (Auster 214). Cast as a quintessential
American hero, Fanshawe is gifted, independent, omnipresent, charismatic,
and driven to explore the world around him.
In contrast to his robust personality, Fanshawe exhibits a lifelong
tendency to retreat into himself, into an internal “locked room,” as it were.
Several early incidents illustrate this inclination. When the narrator and
Fanshawe were young, “no more than four or five years old” Fanshawe would
close himself in an old appliance box, “his secret place” where “he could go
wherever he wanted to go, could be whoever he wanted to be” (Auster, 214).
These early escapes into a cardboard version of a locked room represent
Fanshawe’s desire to create his own life, away from the general public, “For
Fanshawe the only possibility to exist is to be radically isolated from others”

3. (Kugler 68). Indeed, by his teenage years, Fanshawe exhibits withdrawal
behavior:
“[he] became a kind of internal exile, going through the motions of
dutiful behavior, but cut off from his surroundings, contemptuous
of the life he was forced to live…he simply withdrew…Fanshawe
almost disappeared by the time we reached high school” (Auster
212).
Despite his gifts and his potential, Fanshawe disdains his environment and
chooses to withdraw. As a result, he forms a psychological buffer zone—a
locked room—that he carries inside himself and from which he can create
himself. This is an evolutional leap from a child’s cardboard box of fantasies. It
signifies a struggle to define life on his own terms. He is “…the author and
creator of his own self, which is the sole source of strength” (Shiloh 81).
The combination of Fanshawe’s desire to experience life at the edges, his
tendency to separate himself from others, and his inclination to retreat into his
own world results in a powerful drive to control his own destiny. He seems
born to achieve the American dream and fulfill the expectations that come with
it. Instead, in Thoreau-like way, he turns his back on it at every juncture,
retreating further and further from the mainstream. He refuses to star on the
baseball team, excel at Harvard, be a father, and publish his writing. Surely he
would have enjoyed success in all of these endeavors. The wide acclaim his
“posthumous” published writing received bears witness to this. Instead, he
walks away from his heroic potential.
When he ships off on a merchant steamer, sequesters himself in a
Parisian maison de campagne, and enclosed himself in a decrepit Boston

4. townhouse—all forms of a locked room—he pursues a course of his own
choosing rather than remaining trapped in an American heroic narrative he did
not construct. Always in control of his story, Fanshawe continues to use these
locked rooms to define his self in the way he sees fit. Even a Greek merchant
ship serves this purpose:
“I shipped out again…It was disgusting, truly repulsive from
beginning to end. But I truly deserved it; it was exactly what I
wanted (emphasis added)” (Auster 303).
As a result, by the self-ordained end of his life, he has become much less
than he knows he can be, and deliberately so, to the point of becoming a ghost
of himself. When the narrator arrives at the townhouse in Boston, he doesn’t
see Fanshawe at all. He hears from a disembodied pair of lips behind a closed
door, as if listening to the communication of an otherworldly phantom. To be
sure, this locked room remains a place of escape and struggle, but it is also
where Fanshawe has decided to end his story. By denying himself, “Don’t use
that name…Not Fanshawe! Not Fanshawe—ever again!” he arrives at the final
stop on his self-determined journey.
By living in self-exile, surrendering his heroic potential, and refusing to
participate in the American dream, Fanshawe constructs himself as an anti-
hero. He has enclosed himself in many locked rooms along the way, rooms he
could have left at any time, but he used them to evade the culturally imposed
expectations of the American hero’s narrative. This narrative was the decisive
locked room for Fanshawe. Although metaphysical in nature, it is the one that
he fought most to escape. For Fanshawe, “the locked room [is] the ultimate

5. retreat, the ultimate renunciation, leading to the ultimate act of despair”
(Shiloh 100).
At the end of the novel, one last task remains to make good his escape
and complete his story, and that is to die. If the hero always succeeds, then the
anti-hero must fail: “…in the end the only thing he really wanted was to fail—
even to the point of failing himself” (Auster 307). His loaded pistol is the key
that unlocks this room of no return, and even in his closing act, Fanshawe
controls his story. In death, he will lock himself inside in the narrative of the
anti-hero, which thereafter no key can open.
If Fanshawe is the hub of the novel, the narrator is the satellite that
revolves around him. The narrator’s life is inextricably bound up with
Fanshawe’s: “We met before we could talk” (Auster 195), they were blood
brothers for life, and Fanshawe was a ghost the narrator carried around. Thus
from the very beginning of the novel, we see the narrator’s most fundamental
locked room is not a place, but the psychological bond he had with Fanshawe,
“He was…the one I saw whenever I looked up from myself” (Auster 196). The
events that unfold throughout the book depict the narrator’s struggle as he
tries to free himself from this locked room and establish his own identity
independent of Fanshawe. In concert with these events, we will see how the
narrator creates his own locked rooms of secrets and lies that only add to his
anguish.
Initially, the narrator is unwittingly trapped in a narrative controlled by
someone else. Confident of Fanshawe’s demise, he begins a relationship with

6. Fanshawe’s wife Sophie, establishes a stable income editing Fanshawe’s
writing, and dotes on Fanshawe’s child who comes to recognize the narrator as
his father. However, the narrator’s actions not only breathe life into Fanshawe’s
ghostly memory, he inspires Fanshawe’s resurrection from the imaginary dead,
in the form of letter written to the narrator. The letter shakes the narrator out
of his blissful slumber, but in his “greatest failure of all” (Auster 235) he
decides to keep the letter a secret from Sophie and do what Fanshawe asked
him to do: make Sophie divorce Fanshawe, marry her, and be a father to
Fanshawe’s child. According to Peacock, “This gives, then, another meaning to
the title—the locked room is also the destructive secret” (Peacock, 78). Thus, in
doing Fanshawe’s bidding, the narrator accepts Fanshawe’s father-like control
over him and also creates his own kind of locked room, one comprised of
secrets, “I locked up the secret inside me and learned to hold my tongue”
(Auster, 235). At that point, the narrator’s outwardly idyllic family life is
undermined by this undisclosed information and by the internal confusion that
results from his assumption of Fanshawe’s identity. These choices generate an
irreconcilable dissonance that pulls the narrator into a downward spiral of
psychological dissolution.
The narrator’s next moral compromise—his next self-constructed locked
room—was the agreement to write Fanshawe’s biography: “Not only would I
have to leave the letter out, but I would have to pretend that it had never been
written…I plunged into it with deceit in my heart” (Auster 242). Along the way,
he begins to wonder if he were digging a grave, not just for Fanshawe, but also

7. for himself (Auster 246). The narrator continues digging his metaphorical grave
when in a drunken fervor he conquers Fanshawe’s mother. This quasi-
incestuous liaison—“You even look like him you know” (Auster 256)—is a
twisted Oedipal consummation of the narrator’s desire to kill his father-figure
Fanshawe. After this despicable act and yet another secret—another locked
room to strain his increasingly fragile psyche—the “worst began then” (Auster,
263) for the narrator. As Shiloh astutely observes, “…the realization of the
Oedipal fantasy, even in partial terms (the possession of the mother), conduces
to disintegration of the ego” (Shiloh, 93). As he and Sophie’s relationship
deteriorates, he uses the now abandoned idea of a biography as a cover for
hunting down Fanshawe. This is yet another secret to be locked away. Despite
all his efforts, the clues he gathers lead to nothing. However, the more he
reconstructs Fanshawe’s life, the more the narrator seems to vanish as a
person. As Sophie says, “I sometimes think I can see you vanishing before my
eyes” (Auster 280). The vanishing symbolizes the psychological fragmentation
occurring within the narrator, fragmentation which is worsened by the many
locked rooms containing his secrets and lies.
After usurping the Freudian Other (Fanshawe), and even destroying him
in an Oedipal sense, the narrator does not find self-fulfillment. Rather, after
traveling to Paris, he loses his grip on what is left of himself: “A month
is…more than enough for a man to come apart” (Auster, 287). He discovers
that the locked room he has been trying to escape is “located inside my skull”
(Auster 286). Having put on Fanshawe’s identity, he realizes that it does not fit.

8. Fanshawe is only a figment of his imagination, and an imperfect one at that. In
her book, Auster and the Postmodern Quest, Shiloh provides cogent insight on
this point:
“In The Locked Room, the object of the narrator's quest is
Fanshawe's self, which he perceives as a stable and autonomous
entity. But this self is a fictional construct, a fabrication of the
narrator's mind, as were the fictive characters he had invented for
the Harlem census” (Shiloh 102).
Failing in his quest to become the Other, the narrator loses his self: “I felt as
though I was no longer inside myself. I couldn’t feel myself anymore. The
sensation of life had dribbled out of me…the undeniable odor of nothingness”
(Auster 292).
He falls into a euphoric suicidal state, provoking Peter Stillman, aka
“Fanshawe” to pummel him to a hoped for death and release from the locked
room of his self-less, identity-less life. After being beaten to within an inch of
his life, the narrator begins to pull himself and his family back together. As
Martin states, ““With Stillman viewed as Fanshawe, the narrator regains his
independence and is finally reunited with his selfhood” (Martin 140). In
addition, by distancing themselves from Fanshawe (and ironically creating a
shared locked room) he and Sophie strengthen their relationship start to free
themselves from Fanshawe’s ghostly grasp.
This psychological integration process continues to the end of the novel,
where we finally encounter a physical locked room at 9 Columbus Square in
Boston. There, the narrator and Fanshawe meet, each on one side of a closed
double door that is never opened. Although the narrator attempted to enter the

9. locked room of Fanshawe’s self and failed, he has “tasted death” and survived.
That experience has changed him. Now he has the courage to confront
Fanshawe as his own man, even if Fanshawe functions as a trope for death, “I
learned to live with him in the same way I learned to live with my own death”
(Auster 295). The two men are now separate selves, separated by the door both
physically and psychologically. The narrator understands that “he cannot
transcend the boundaries of self and that his desire to unite with the other can
never be satisfied” (Shiloh 100).
Not without some anguish, the narrator leaves the townhouse carrying
Fanshawe’s red notebook that purports to contain an “explanation for what I
did” (Auster 304). After reading it and finding no answers, the narrator
destroys the notebook page by page. Through this act, the narrator releases
himself from Fanshawe’s control over him. The narrator finds the key to his
fundamental locked room and, most importantly, his self-identity. In this
assertion of self, the narrator finally awakens to himself, “I could see my breath
in the air before me, leaving my mouth in little bursts of fog (emphasis added)”
(Auster 308).
The locked room metaphor operates in multiple ways in Auster’s novel.
For Fanshawe, there were three main ways. First, the locked room was a way of
isolating himself from others (e.g. the cardboard box, the open grave, the ships,
and the locked room) enabling him to create his own life and experience it in
his own way. Second, by refusing the hero’s role, Fanshawe was able to assert
control over his own life narrative, thus freeing himself from societal

10. expectations associated with his natural gifts and talents. Third, Fanshawe
created a locked room for the narrator using his past friendship and father-like
power to direct and control the narrator’s life. For the narrator, the locked
room functioned as a psychological enclosure for secrets and lies (e.g. the
letters, the affair, the pretense of writing a biography, and the lost month in
Paris). It also served to underscore his struggle to establish his own identity
independent of Fanshawe. In the end, but not without a monumental effort, he
escapes the Fanshawe-centered locked room within himself. In the broadest
sense, the locked room symbolizes the quest for self. Although Fanshawe and
the narrator took two different paths on this quest, both journeys involved a
desire to escape from imposed notions of self as well as a prolonged struggle to
establish their identities. If there is a mystery in The Locked Room, it is the
mystery posed by the question, “Who am I?” In this novel at least, that mystery
remains largely unsolved.

11. Works Cited
Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books,
1990. Print.
Kugler, Matthias. “Paul Auster's "The New York Trilogy" as Postmodern
Detective Fiction.” MA Thesis. University of Freiburg, 1999.
Martin, Brendan. Paul Auster's Postmodernity. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Print.
Peacock, James. Understanding Paul Auster. Columbia: University of South
Carolina, 2010. Print.
Shiloh, Ilana. Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: On the Road to Nowhere. New
York: Lang, Peter, Publishing Inc, 2012. Print.