Throughout his early career, Paul Auster’s experimentation with literary form made him one of the leading American postmodernist prose writers of his time. While Auster himself owes this prestige to the thematic foundations laid out in his debut memoir, The Invention of Solitude (1982), his succeeding works, The New York Trilogy (1985) and Moon Palace (1989) are also formal experiments in themselves, for they draw upon elements from popular genres and use these patterns to create discursive links to his memoir. In the case of Moon Palace, Auster deploys literary elements that are usually associated with the picaresque genre.

The picaresque novel finds its origins in 16th-century Spain, where an anonymous novel entitled Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) established the archetype of the picaro. The picaro is a low-status outsider who narrates the story and experiences a series of loosely connected events. However, these experiences do not cause the picaro to change their ways; instead, they learn how to adapt to a world that rejected them at first. The picaro was written to appeal to the sympathy and wit of the reader, and the Spanish picaresque novel used this approach to critique society, foregrounding the collapse of traditional values against the backdrop of rising imperial power and prosperity. The popularity of this genre is evidenced by the fact that Miguel de Cervantes deployed select elements from the picaresque novel in his magnum opus, Don Quixote (1605-1615). The form similarly flourished across Europe, manifesting in later novels such as Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). However, because its appeal was so strong, the picaresque novel became a form of entertainment for bourgeois readers in Enlightenment Germany and France, catering to their desire for stories of comedy and roguish resilience.

In the United States, iterations of the picaresque novel closely resembled the Spanish version but was flavored by the paradoxical humor and horror of the American frontier. This trend culminated in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which maintained many of the identifying traits of the picaresque novel by satirizing racism and championing the individual values of the roguish title character. The American picaresque novel would continue to find new manifestations as the United States settled into its modern incarnation, finding a new picaro in the American protagonist who either resists the life that social standards have predetermined for them (as in John Updike’s 1960 novel Rabbit, Run) or revives the spirit of the frontier pioneers (as in Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road).

The 1970s and 1980s saw a new renaissance in the American picaresque novel as writers began to consider how American society was moving away from its postwar prosperity and the conservative values it espoused. This shift resulted in works like John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), which follows the misadventures of an overeducated New Orleans traditionalist struggling to find employment. Moon Palace fits into this tradition because its narrator becomes overly reliant on chance and optimism to resolve his material issues; as someone who lost his mother at an early age and grew up without ever knowing his father, he uses this philosophy to make sense of his identity. This story premise allowed Auster to revisit one of the major themes from his own memoir: his fraught relationship with his late father.