Chance is the major element that dictates Fogg’s life, though Auster never fully clarifies whether chance is intended to function as a force that drives free will or a force that subverts it. Chance takes Fogg to Kitty Wu, who represents a clean break from the patterns of his parents’ and grandparents’ life. Chance also takes Fogg to Effing, who leads Fogg back to his own father. What is less ambiguous is how Fogg chooses to respond to chance; he remains open to randomness but ultimately leans in the direction that leads him back to harmony. Fogg demonstrates this personal pattern in the events that lead him to his experiences in Central Park, for he willingly relies on chance encounters to help him find the resolution to his material issues, deciding that poverty may give him a chance to better understand what “doom” feels like. Rather than use his free will to solve his problems, Fogg treats the nebulous concept of chance as the compass of his life, which paradoxically makes chance akin to destiny in the influence it has on his experiences.

Contained within the drifting threads of the young Fogg’s rather directionless existence, Auster builds a counter-narrative to the protagonist’s views on randomness, for the seemingly aimless drift of his activities ironically brings a new sense of meaning to his life when he inadvertently meets men who help to explain his own origins. These encounters essentially contradict Fogg’s sense of free will by suggesting that he is doomed to repeat certain cycles of history, and even these patterns only reveal themselves when he realizes the truth of his parentage and his family background. The author reinforces this through premature exposition, as when Fogg-the-narrator reveals that Solomon is his father long before Fogg-the-protagonist ever discovers this fact. This strategic placement of expository detail recontextualizes the meaning of Solomon and Effing’s stories, turning them into patterns that the young Fogg unwittingly follows in his own life.

When Fogg learns that Solomon is his father, he gradually realizes that just as Effing’s absence greatly affected Solomon’s life and sense of self, Solomon’s own absence from Fogg’s life has left the protagonist with a similar crisis of identity. When Solomon realized that he would never get to form a meaningful relationship with his father, he sought an identity that gave him strength, rather than drawing upon his fraught family dynamics to give his personal life more meaning. Given the pointed parallels between Solomon and Fogg, it is clear that Auster means to place Fogg at the same philosophical crossroads. Now that Fogg is coming to terms with the question of his relationship with his father, he must decide whether he wants to live according to his own decisions or let the patterns of Solomon and Effing’s lives give him an arbitrary direction, erasing the need for him to make his own choices.

By this point, however, Auster has already established the central character element that allows Fogg to determine which path to take. Although Fogg initially went to New York to transcend his circumstances through education, he ends up on the opposite side of the country to seek renewal and reinvention, and his philosophical embrace of life’s randomness has ultimately been the author of his deepest epiphanies about the nature of his existence. Through Fogg’s story, Auster meditates on the myth of the modern American, creating a more nuanced version of the dominant cultural belief that everyone has the freedom to pursue the life they want for themselves.