“Uncle Victor found meanings where no one else would have found them, and then, very deftly, he turned them into a form of clandestine support. The truth was that I enjoyed it when he showered all this attention on me, and even though I knew his speeches were so much bluster and hot air, there was a part of me that believed every word he said.”

This passage explicates the influence that Uncle Victor has on Fogg’s early thinking. Victor inculcates his idealistic worldview on Fogg, which fills in the instructive gap left by the absence of the protagonist’s parents. Although Fogg is sometimes critical of Victor’s perspective, he nonetheless relies on his uncle as a model for his own worldview because he has no other example to follow—and he will not, until he encounters Effing and Solomon in later years.

“For the time being, we move off in opposite directions. But sooner or later we’ll meet again, I’m sure of it. Everything works out in the end, you see, everything connects. The nine circles. The nine planets. The nine innings. Our nine lives. Just think of it. The correspondences are infinite.”

This passage represents Victor’s worldview, which underscores the search for harmony in a chaotic world. From Victor’s romanticized perspective, everything is fundamentally connected, and he teaches Fogg to be optimistic that everything he experiences will have a purpose that adds to the larger narrative of his life. Ironically, however, Victor’s assurance that he and Fogg will meet again is undermined when the narrative later reveals that Victor dies before the two ever manage to reunite.

“More than anything else, the suit was the badge of my identity, the emblem of how I wanted others to see me.”

This passage cements the suit’s initial symbolic function as a representation of Fogg’s attachment to Victor, emphasizing Victor’s influence over Fogg. By wearing the suit every day, Fogg expresses his admiration of Victor as a role model, even specifying that this is how he wants to be seen by others. However, this habit also sets the stage for the transformation of the suit’s symbolic meaning, as Fogg’s insistence on wearing it daily leaves it susceptible to degradation, exposing the flaws in Fogg’s romantic mindset.

“I was in despair, and in the face of so much upheaval, I felt that drastic action of some sort was necessary. I wanted to spit on the world, to do the most outlandish thing possible. With all the fervor and idealism of a young man who had thought too much and read too many books, I decided that the thing I should do was nothing: my action would consist of a militant refusal to take any action at all.”

This passage reveals the impact of Victor’s death on Fogg, who reacts with radical resistance, viewing his willful passivity as way to reject the immutable reality of the world he lives in. Auster subtly hints at the foolishness of Fogg’s decision by having the older Fogg, who narrates the story, view this past decision with a guarded sense of distance. As the older Fogg comments, this was a choice made by an idealistic youth who “had thought too much and read too many books.”

“Sometimes it’s like everybody’s gone crazy. If you wanna know what I think, it’s those things they’re shooting into space. All that weird shit, those satellites and rockets. You send people to the moon, something’s gotta give. You know what I mean? It makes people do strange things. You can’t fuck with the sky and expect nothing to happen.”

Auster uses Fernandez’s commentary on the moon landing to undermine Fogg’s choices and question his romantic view of the world. By suggesting that the decision to go to the moon is “crazy,” Fernandez’s criticism also extends to Fogg’s choice to live at the absolute limit of his being. He does not condone Fogg’s “strange” actions; instead, he uses the strangeness of the moon landing to explain why Fogg is exhibiting such odd behavior.

“I had jumped off the edge of a cliff, and then, just as I was about to hit bottom, an extraordinary event took place: I learned that there were people who loved me. To be loved like that makes all the difference. It does not lessen the terror of the fall, but it gives a new perspective on what that terror means. I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, the one thing powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.”

This passage preempts the event of Fogg’s rescue from Central Park, defusing the tension that surrounds his time there by foreshadowing this interlude’s optimistic end. The narrative moment also marks a turning point in Fogg’s life as he comes to realize that he is not alone in the world despite Victor’s death. He implies that although his passivity was an act of self-destruction, this errant pursuit also forced him to appreciate the existence of people who were concerned for his well-being. This experience opens him up to becoming more selfless and deepening his relationships with the people he meets.

“‘It sounds familiar, doesn’t it?’ Zimmer asked.

‘Familiar?’ I said. ‘It’s one of the most exotic stories I’ve ever heard.’

‘Only on the surface. Scratch away some of the local color, and it boils down to almost the same story of someone else I know. Give or take a few details, of course.’”

After sharing Kitty’s story with Fogg, Zimmer tries to get Fogg to realize the similarities between their past experiences. However, Fogg fails to understand Zimmer’s point, even going so far as to call Kitty’s story “exotic.” This obtuseness underscores his solipsism, pointing to his inability to relate to Kitty’s story and appreciate her capacity to empathize with him. Only when Zimmer awakens him to this possibility does Fogg start opening himself up to her.

“As I eventually learned, this was the real Effing, if real is a word that can be used in talking about him. So much of his character was built on falsehood and deception, it was nearly impossible to know when he was telling the truth. He loved to trick the world with his sudden experiments and inspirations, and of all the stunts he pulled, the one he liked best was playing dead.”

In this passage, Auster cements the characterization of Effing as a consummate unreliable narrator. As the passage relates, Effing glories in creating ambiguity through his words and actions, and even though the idealistic Fogg sees great emotional value in the man’s stories, he can never be certain whether Effing is being honest with him.

“If this good side of Effing was genuine, however, then why didn’t he allow it to come out more often? Was it merely an aberration of his true self, or was it in fact the essence of who he really was? I never reached any definite conclusions about this, except perhaps that it was impossible to exclude either alternative. Effing was both things at once. He was a monster, but at the same time he had it in him to be a good man, a man I could even bring myself to admire. This prevented me from hating him as thoroughly as I would have liked.”

Auster deepens Effing’s characterization by explaining the contradictions in his behavior. Though Effing often devotes himself to deception, there are rare moments that reveal his capacity for warmth and sincerity. This paradox encourages Fogg to continue in his employment under Effing as he strives to understand the irascible man’s redeeming qualities.

“The problem was remembering which story I had told when. I kept it all straight in my head for years, making sure not to give people a different version when I saw them again. That added a certain thrill to it, knowing that I could be caught at any moment, that someone could stand up out of the blue and start calling me a liar. If you’re going to lie, you might as well make it dangerous for yourself.”

In this passage, Effing uses a matter-of-fact tone to acknowledge his own inherent unreliability as a narrator, and his assertion injects a certain metafictional element into the narrative. Given that Effing’s account is essentially a story-within-a-story—an inner layer of Fogg’s own complex narrative—the interwoven threads of perception and narration obscure any hints as to where the truth ends and the deception begins. This awareness also drives Fogg’s conclusion that the inspiration he gleans from Effing’s emotional truths hold far more weight than the historical or material truth of his tales.

“If men can live comfortably in their surroundings, he seemed to be saying, if they can learn to feel themselves a part of the things around them, then perhaps life on earth becomes imbued with a feeling of holiness.”

Fogg reaches this insight while looking at Blakelock’s painting, Moonlight, and this allusion to the moon motif highlights the search for harmony in a chaotic world. Fogg’s interpretation superimposes his personal worldview onto the artist’s work, suggesting that the only way to reach a sublime state (a secular version of holiness) is by becoming fully present in one’s environment. This experience reflects Fogg’s attempts in the latter half of the novel to wholly integrate himself in the presence of the people whose company he keeps, from Effing to Solomon Barber.

“When Tesla’s eyes went through me, I experienced my first taste of death. That’s closer to what I mean. I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.”

Effing’s supposed encounter with Nikola Tesla drives him to see death as the motivating factor that allows him to act as he pleases in his life. The story explains his preoccupation with Bargaining with Reality to Reinvent the Self. Faced the knowledge that he is destined for death and irrelevance, Effing is inspired to seize the circumstances of his life and master them to his satisfaction.

“A man can’t know where he is on the earth except in relation to the moon or a star. Astronomy comes first; land maps follow because of it. Just the opposite of what you’d expect. If you think about it long enough, it will turn your brain inside-out. A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There’s this only because there’s that; if we don’t look up, we’ll never know what’s down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not. You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.”

This passage resonates with Fogg’s view of the moon as an anchor for his life, something he looks to for direction when he feels lost or caught in the chaos of the world. The sentiment directly foreshadows the end of the novel by suggesting that Fogg will find himself only in relation to the moon, which is the final image that Fogg contemplates after traveling to the far end of the continent, discarding his former life in New York.

“The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.”

Effing’s time in the desert teaches him a new way of looking at art, and he learns to prioritize process over outcome. This philosophy resonates with Fogg’s journey, which is predicated less on the outcome of who Fogg is at the end of the story than on the process of becoming the person he turns out to be.

“In spite of the revulsion he sometimes inspired in me, I could not help thinking of him as a kindred spirit. Perhaps it started when we got to the episode about the cave. I had my own memories of living in a cave, after all, and when he described the loneliness he had felt then, it struck me that he was somehow describing the same things I had felt. My own story was just as preposterous as Effing’s, but I knew that if I ever chose to tell it to him, he would have believed every word I said.”

This passage cements Effing as a mentor figure for Fogg, who admires the emotional truth of Effing’s story despite the ambiguity that surrounds its historical truth. Fogg resonates with the story, which, even if it were invented, convinces him that Effing can relate to his own experiences as an outsider and a wanderer in life. This passage gives Fogg a new model for bargaining with reality to reinvent the self.

“‘I think you’d better have it. You never know when it might start raining again, and I wouldn’t want you guys to get wet. That’s the thing about the weather: it changes all the time. If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.’

‘It’s like money in the bank,’ said Effing.

‘You got it, Tom,’ said Orlando. ‘Just stick it under your mattress and save it for a rainy day.’”

The conversation about Orlando’s imaginary umbrella drives the metaphor of the futility of Effing’s wealth. In this light, Effing’s wealth is akin to the umbrella that Orlando has kept to save himself from bad situations. In his seclusion, however, Effing has insulated himself from the possibility of experiencing bad things, save for the death of Pavel Shum. By hoarding his wealth, Effing has rendered it useless, and it becomes nothing more than an illusory safeguard for an imaginary “rainy day.” Given these metaphors, it is no coincidence that Effing’s own demise is accelerated by his willful exposure to a literal “rainy day.”

“‘You’re a dreamer, boy,’ he said. ‘Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, it’s never going to be anywhere else. You have no ambitions, you don’t give a damn about money, and you’re too much of a philosopher to have any feeling for art. What am I going to do with you? You need someone to look after you, to make sure you have food in your belly and a bit of cash in your pocket. Once I’m gone, you’ll be right back where you started.’”

This passage cements a turning point in Effing’s relationship with Fogg. Effing speaks to Fogg with a warm, affectionate tone, signaling a shift away from the cold rudeness with which he first introduced himself. Moreover, he expresses concern over Fogg’s fate, worrying over his prospects after Effing dies. This moment suggests his desire to continue being Fogg’s benefactor, even though the end of his life is near.

“No matter how great an artist he might have been, Julian Barber’s paintings could never match the ones that Thomas Effing had already given to me. I had dreamed them for myself from his words, and as such they were perfect, infinite, more exact in their representation of the real than reality itself. As long as I did not open my eyes, I could go on imagining them forever.”

This passage is crucial to developing Auster’s examination of bargaining with reality to reinvent the self. When confronted with the magazine’s rejection of Effing’s obituary, Fogg is faced with the challenge of proving the historical truth of his late employer’s story. Fogg immediately chooses to abandon that endeavor because it would mean undermining the emotional truth that Effing’s story has created in his mind. Instead, he prioritizes the way he imagines Effing as Barber, rather than proving that Effing really was Barber.

“He was alone now, entirely separate from everyone: a bulbous, egg-shaped monad plodding through the shambles of his consciousness. But the work had paid off, and he no longer feared this isolation. By plunging into the chaos that inhabited him, he had become Solomon Barber at last, a personage, a someone, a self-created world unto himself.”

In contrast to Effing, Solomon radically embraces the realities of his life, using them as the foundation for his identity. Although people judge him and alienate him because of his large size, Solomon embraces his physical characteristics in order to convert them into a source of strength, reinventing his own identity in a much more pragmatic way than Fogg’s fanciful imaginings.

“No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That’s what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.”

Much like the earlier passage in which Fogg preemptively reveals that Kitty and Zimmer would save him due to their love for him, Fogg preempts the moment when he learns that Solomon is his father by prematurely delivering this exposition, which suggests that his failure to learn the truth sooner was a matter of chance. Inasmuch as Fogg trusts chance to resolve the issues of his life, this passage suggests the opposite: that chance can also be responsible for driving conflict by keeping Fogg away from the knowledge that might lead him to a more substantial resolution.

“I wanted to be a father, and now that the prospect was before me, I couldn’t stand the thought of losing it. The baby was my chance to undo the loneliness of my childhood, to be part of a family, to belong to something that was more than just myself, and because I had not been aware of this desire until then, it came rushing out of me in huge, inarticulate bursts of desperation.”

This passage is crucial in revealing the flaws of Fogg’s position in his lifelong endeavor of bargaining with reality to reinvent the self. When faced with the prospect of fatherhood, Fogg rejects the idea of Kitty terminating her pregnancy because he instinctively values the narrative in which he uses the existence of this child to correct the inherited trauma of his own absent father. He is so enamored of this idea that he devalues Kitty’s bodily agency.

“[T]he idea of a useless quest, of setting out on a journey that was doomed to failure, appealed to my sense of things at that moment. We would search, but we would not find. Only the going itself would matter, and in the end we would be left with nothing but the futility of our own ambitions. This was a metaphor I could live with, the leap into emptiness I had always dreamed of.”

Fogg accepts Solomon’s offer to search for Effing’s fabled cave precisely because of the quixotic nature of the quest. He leans into the illusion that they can discover the cave, thinking that the quest itself is more important than the arrival at their destination. This, Fogg suggests, would be enough to reinstate purpose and drive in his life in the wake of his breakup with Kitty. By characterizing the endeavor as a “leap into emptiness,” he also stresses the arbitrariness of life itself.

“For twenty-four years, I had lived with an unanswerable question, and little by little I had come to embrace that enigma as the central fact about myself. My origins were a mystery, and I would never know where I had come from. This was what defined me, and by now I was used to my own darkness, clinging to it as a source of knowledge and self-respect, trusting in it as an ontological necessity. No matter how hard I might have dreamed of finding my father, I had never thought it would be possible.”

This passage explains why Fogg reacts angrily to the discovery that Solomon is his father. Fogg is so driven by the myth of his absent father that he cannot reconcile this concept with the unwelcome realization that his father may have already proven to be a positive force in his life. His friendship with Solomon and his quest for the love of a present father contradict each other so intensely that Fogg would have to abandon one narrative in order to accept the other, and he finds himself unable to make this inner adjustment.