Marco Stanley Fogg Analysis

B. Marco Stanley Fogg as a Postmodern Picaro
Fogg begins to tell his life story by saying “It was the summer that men first walked on the moon” (Auster 1). The moon landing has been the longest and the most exciting journey of mankind so far. When Marco Fogg says he will tell us his youth life and he says " I did not believe there ever would be a future” (Auster 1). With this sentence indeed he shows us that as all picaro characters he lives in present time and does not think about his future as we know it from Holden, Dean and Sal. Also, as in the case of all picaro characters, journey has an important place in Marco Stanley Fogg’s life. The significance of journey motif is even clear in Marco Stanley Fogg’s name which is highly suggestive and intertextual, thus Uncle Victor played deliberately with his name. Marco says, according to Uncle Victor, his name: proved that travel was in my blood, that life would carry me to

S., which is an abbreviation often used for manuscript. Victor approves this choice of name and says that “every man is the author of his own life […] The book you are writing is not yet finished. Therefore, it’s a manuscript.” (Auster 7) Life is presented as an unfinished book, and Bernd Herzogenrath in his book An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster goes further the reading of Marco as a picaro: “in its open-endedness: just like the life it depicts, the individual picaresque is ‘a work in progress.’” (119) Victor, moreover, invokes the ideal of the “self-made man”: “every man is the author of his own life.” In additon to the meaning of his name, it is stated that his surname ‘Fogg’ is coming from a French word, Fogel which means bird in English. (Auster 3) Marco is delighted the meaning of his surname: “… ancestor of mine had once actually been able to fly. A bird flying through fog, …, a giant bird flying across the ocean, not stopping until it reached America.” (Auster