Exploring trauma and paranoia in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions

To understand the manifold responses to trauma, examining aspects of psychological functioning within the social or cultural environment is required. Fiction that depicts trauma incorporates varied responses and survival behaviors within the characterizations of survivors. Individuals feel unprotected when cultures do not function as per his desire and are forced to survive in isolation. Victims may respond to trauma in an unsympathetic environment or in this other chaos by adapting their authentic self as best as they can with survival characteristics, such as anxiety, paranoia, emotional withdrawal, all leads them toward existential crisis. The various cause and effects of trauma have moved away from a traditional mode, which focused more on the internalized isolated psychic elements toward a new trauma model that rather emphasizes on the interaction of social and behavioral issues associated with trauma. Experts explain that in order to accurately measure the behavioral causes, trait-driven conceptions of personality are less important than the individual’s personal history of conditioning, personal constructs, and their psychological circumstances. In this context, this paper attempts to research the absurd modern world where a self or individual has been threaten by this other world in some way, such as people watching you or acting against you, even though there is no proof that it threat or the fear of paranoia is true or not. Wherein the reading of Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions (2002) discusses the story of Hector Man introduced as a Vanished his disappearance depicts the profound ineptitude to exist in an absurd world, where his existence was framed as insignificant for the world. He is involved in a self-imposed exile from his unfortunate past because of his involvement in a death of his beloved. The trauma of his horrific past and the fear of returning back to the other world impel him into a world of paranoia, this generates an existential threat where constantly the isolated self gets threaten by other world.