The Music of Chance by Paul Auster
**Overview of *The Music of Chance* by Paul Auster**
*The Music of Chance* is a novel by Paul Auster that explores themes of chance, freedom, and the human condition through the story of two drifters, Jim Nashe and Jack Pozzi. Following a devastating divorce, Nashe embarks on a year-long journey of aimless driving across the United States. He encounters Pozzi, who is down on his luck after losing a poker game, and decides to finance him in a high-stakes game against eccentric lottery winners, Flower and Stone. When the poker game leads to a significant loss, Nashe and Pozzi agree to work off their debt by building a stone wall at the millionaires' estate, ultimately discovering that their work is a new form of entrapment rather than liberation.
As they labor under the watchful eye of an overseer, their relationship dynamics and individual identities unfold, reflecting Auster's examination of existential themes. The novel's characters, while distinct, often symbolize broader human experiences, particularly through their interactions with luck and fate. Auster's writing is noted for its blend of clarity and absurdity, drawing influences from literary figures like Kafka, Camus, and Beckett, and suggesting a deeper commentary on the nature of life and choice. Overall, *The Music of Chance* serves as a thought-provoking reflection on the randomness of existence and the search for meaning amidst chaos.
The Music of Chance by Paul Auster
First published: 1990
Type of plot: Absurdist
Time of work: The 1990’s
Locale: Eastern Pennsylvania
Principal Characters:
Jim Nashe , an unemployed firefighter, drifter, and philosophizerJack Pozzi , a temperamental gambler and drifterFlower , a lottery winner and gambler, a pudgy companion of StoneStone , a lottery winner and gambler, a skinny companion of FlowerMurks , a job boss who oversees the building of a wall
The Novel
The Music of Chance is the story of two drifters who lose everything in a poker game with two eccentric lottery winners and agree to pay off their debt by erecting a stone wall. As they perform this mindless labor, they find that instead of forfeiting their freedom, they have simply replaced one illusion of freedom with another.
Jim Nashe and Jack Pozzi are the main characters in the novel. Nashe is recovering from a trying period in his life following a devastating divorce. His way of coping was to quit his job, empty his bank account, and take off for a year of relentless cross-country driving. Near the end of his travels, just north of New York City, he spots Pozzi stumbling along the side of the road, beaten and broke after an ill-fated poker game. Nashe is sympathetic and, after hearing Pozzi’s story, agrees to bankroll Pozzi in a poker game with two millionaire lottery winners named Flower and Stone. After a brief stopover in New York, Nashe and Pozzi head for southeastern Pennsylvania, where Flower and Stone, who live in a crumbling old mansion, show them the house and feed them children’s food for dinner. Flower, Stone, and Pozzi then begin the poker game as Nashe watches. At one point, Nashe leaves the room for quite a while; upon his return, he finds that Pozzi is having a losing streak that continues until he loses everything. As a last resort, they cut the deck for ten thousand dollars—and Pozzi loses again.
To pay off their debt to Flower and Stone, Nashe and Pozzi agree to hire on as stonemasons, at ten dollars an hour, to build a wall from a stockpile of huge stones the millionaires have had shipped from Ireland. The job looks impossible, but the two men throw themselves into it; after a while, as their bodies toughen, they get into harmony with the project and even resist efforts to lighten the task. To make sure they do not escape, there is a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounding the area and an overseer named Murks present to keep an eye on them. When Nashe and Pozzi finally fulfill their bargain and pay off their debt, they are still broke, so they ask if they can stay on and earn some money for themselves. Flower and Stone agree, and Nashe and Pozzi decide to celebrate with a party. Food and drink are brought, as well as the services of a prostitute from Atlantic City named Tiffany. After the party is over, Nashe and Pozzi learn that the cost for the party is to be added on to the balance they owe Stone and Flower. This so angers Pozzi that he decides to run away.
The next day Nashe sees Pozzi, beaten and bloody, lying half-dead in the mud outside the trailer. Murks takes him to the hospital, but Nashe never hears from him again and suspects the worst. In an effort to learn the truth about Pozzi, Nashe talks Murks into bringing Tiffany back for another party, his intention being to get her to find out about Pozzi and get a message back to Nashe. Before Nashe has time to receive any word back from Tiffany, he agrees to accompany Murks and his son-in-law Floyd to a roadhouse for a few drinks. It is a snowy night, with the weather deteriorating rapidly. Since the car they take is Nashe’s old Saab, Nashe asks if he can drive the car on the way back. Murks and Floyd agree, and Nashe is joyful as he takes the wheel and heads back through the blinding snow. As conditions grow worse, Nashe drives faster and faster; mesmerized by the blinding light of an oncoming train, he heads straight for it.
The Characters
While the characters in this existential novel have individual identities, they are still more two-dimensional than three-dimensional. Auster presents them in pairs that are two halves of one complete personality. Thus, there are two protagonists, two antagonists, and two cardboard flunkies.
Jim Nashe is thirty-four and recently divorced. When he receives an inheritance from his father, he quits his job as a firefighter, withdraws all of his money from his bank, and hits the road in his red Saab in search of meaning and direction. Although his driving seems aimless and frenzied, he carefully maps each day’s trip, so that there is indeed method in his madness. His compulsive driving becomes an odyssey during which he experiences threats, fears, melancholy, desperation, and infatuation. At one point, he reconnects with a woman he once knew and almost stays on with her, only to realize that he would be merely compounding his problem. Instead, he concentrates on his daughter, Juliette, who is with her mother in Minnesota, visiting her as often as he can. When, after a year, Nashe crosses paths with Jack Pozzi, he has reached a point where his destiny can be decided only by chance. Thus, the chance to bankroll Pozzi in a poker game is to him the reasonable solution to a problem he cannot solve himself. When he loses everything, he takes it with a shrug, figuring this was meant to be. Later, when Pozzi decides to escape from Stone and Flower, Nashe stays behind to finish the job, partly to cover for Pozzi but mostly because the building of the wall has given his life the meaning it lacked. He is now liberated from doing anything except working on the wall.
Pozzi is a feisty younger man, tough, wiry, resilient, passionate, and convinced of his invincibility as a poker player. His destiny rides on the luck of the draw, and when, for the first time, he finds himself a loser, he has trouble accepting it. Initially, he goes along with the contract to build the wall and thus repay the debt, but ultimately he balks at the deal and convinces himself that the whole game was rigged. At this point he has to escape, no matter what, but he is caught and savagely beaten. In fact, readers have every reason to think that he died, the victim of a dirty deal.
The other characters in the novel are even more two-dimensional. Flower and Stone, whom Pozzi calls Laurel and Hardy, assume their identity from each other and function as alter egos. They disappear from the novel once the deal has been struck, leaving the enforcement of the deal up to Murks. Murks and his son-in-law Daryl are two sides of the taskmaster personality. Murks functions as a blindly loyal overseer who carries out his duty but does it with a measure of compassion, while Daryl is the creepy flunky who undoubtedly caught and beat Pozzi.
Critical Context
The Music of Chance seems clearly to have its roots in Auster’s bitter struggles during his early years as a writer. Auster’s previous works all point to this novel, from the Kafkaesque prose, lucid yet cryptic, to the fatalism of Albert Camus, whose own death in a car accident is mirrored in Nashe’s. Although Auster obviously owes debts to Kafka and Camus, there are also traces of black humor that suggest the influence of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. There is also a strong relationship between Auster’s absurd realism and that found in The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. What is important about The Music of Chance is the fact that Auster is able to make the absurd believable through lucid prose, clear focus, and a narrative flow that allows the book to be read on many levels, from a buddy story to a black comedy.
Bibliography
Auster, Paul. Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. A disturbing account of the author’s difficult early years. Uneven in treatment, but contains some revealing insights into the genesis of The Music of Chance.
Barone, Dennis, ed. Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. This first book-length study of Auster’s work includes generous commentary on The Music of Chance.
Bawer, Bruce. “Family Ties with an Athenian Twist.” The Wall Street Journal, September 21, 1990, p. A12. Delightfully stimulating observations on The Music of Chance by an original critic.
Irwin, Mark. “Memory’s Escape: Inventing The Music of Chance—A Conversation with Paul Auster.” Denver Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Winter, 1994): 111-122. A provocative insight into Auster’s techniques, purposes, and personality.
Mannes-Abbott, Guy. “The Music of Chance.” New Statesman and Society 4, no. 143 (March 22, 1991): 45. A refreshing look at The Music of Chance through the ideas of a respected English critic.
Saltzman, Arthur M. Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Includes challenging commentary on The Music of Chance.