Paul Auster is a prominent American novelist and poet; he was a Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for his novel, The Music of Chance. This book’s protagonist, Jim Nashe, is an ex-fireman who has left his family to earn money. He and his friend named Pozzi found wounded on the motorway by him are trapped in a house and forced to make a “wailing” wall because of their gambling debts. Because Jim was a vagabond before his enslavement, Auster invokes Thomas Nashe’s picaresque novel, The Unfortunate Traveller. Critics typically address Jim’s home confinement from both spiritual and physical perspectives. The Music of Chance deals with a sense of meaningless in modern life. Oberman sees Jim “in an existential confrontation with his own freedom” (192). He continues to say that modern people stick “within the culture of late capitalism” (192). In fact, Jim Nashe is a traditional American picaro who “forsakes his family ties, breaks from the past, and seeks to re-create himself through the freedom of the open road” (Shiloh, and Auster, 492). Jim’s ethnic and cultural foundations inform his behaviors. An ethnic Jew, Auster illustrates the suffering of Holocaust survivors. Jim Nashe’s experiences are similar to those of Jews in the Holocaust or the Pogroms. He lives in a space that limits his freedom; he prefers death to living this way. In this study, I examine Jim’s incarceration and the reasons for it.

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