Dante's Influence in Paul Auster's "Invisible"

The Invisible Dante in Paul Auster's Invisible

Included in this post is a link to an article about Invisible, a recent novel by Paul Auster, one of my favorite writers. The article investigates the structural and thematic ties to the Divine Comedies, exploring both overt references to the comedies throughout the novel, and more subtle parallelisms. Invisible tells the story of a young man who experiences his own moral crisis after witnessing an acquaintance commit a gruesome murder, and his subsequent search for redemption. Within the first sentence of the novel, we see a reference to Dante. This occurs when the protagonists is introduced to a man named Rudolf Born, and converses with him about his namesake, Bertran de Born, a 13^th century poet who appears in the Inferno.

            Within these overt references to the Comedy, there exist more subtle references and similarieties. One interesting mention is how Invisible mimics Dante’s infatuation with the number three. Dante believed three to be a holy number, because of the Christian trinity. He wrote the Divine Comedy in three parts, he had the pilgrim encounter three beasts at the beginning of Inferno, and each of the comedies has 33 cantos. Likewise, Auster wrote  Invisible in three parts, and as the article points out, the novel references the number three many more times than coincidence would have it. The article goes on to point out various other thematic similarities between Invisible and Dante’s comedies, and it made me think about one of my favorite novels in a different way. Auster shares Dante's obsession for having every detail imbued with meaning, and with each new reading more of these meanings emerge.