Özet:

The literary expression of the body in autobiography brings forth several problematic issues related to narrative politics and style. Insight is gained about themes like mind-body interaction, mental representation of sense experience, experience of space, and Iother relationship through the narrator’s manner of representing his body in the autobiographical text. The narrative style will also gain its form according to the textual function of the body and it will be fashioned so as to be able to convey bodily experiences. In this context, the autobiographer, as an embodied subject, depicts his body as a tool for cognition and reminiscence. This is an effort to organize personal life experiences around the human body, which is the common corporeal substructure of all human beings, and it aims to reach a concrete mode of narration. This study is going to investigate the focus on the body in Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, which is a second-person narrative, in its effect on the abovementioned themes and narrative style. How the depictions of bodily experiences and perceptions in Auster’s autobiography locate the subject in its relation to itself and to the external world is also going to be examined. In addition, the way this depiction of the body represents the autobiographical subject will be assessed with reference to Baruch Spinoza’s rationalism and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis, both of which are intended towards overcoming Cartesian body-mind dualism

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