Paul Auster manipulates the realistic narrative of contrivances in a clever way by underlining its constructedness. He remains self-reflexive about the contrivances in his plot by having his narrator reflect about the incredulous random patterning of events in life which expose the fact that contingency is anything but illogical. The philosophically interesting question for me in this 'postmodern' narrative technique is whether chance can always be unraveled, retrospectively speaking, as a perfectly (almost too perfect!) logical series of events. To put it with brevity and precision: how logical and readable is chance? If it's logical and readable in a logical way, can we equate this logically readable view of chance with determinism?
The other thing this novel made me think is the possibility of a dialectical tension between the two selves of the artist as a creator of a subversive work of art and a subversive socio-political activist. Is there a tension between these two roles? Does a committed artist feel the impotence of his art as a subversive practice? The two novelists in this novel form the alter-ego of one another and ask this old and yet important question. We have seen cases where subversive activism can become problematic for literary creation e.g. Arundhati Roy or where the writer almost entirely textualises his subversive politics in authorial practice e.g. Amitav Ghosh.
Leviathan with its complex narrative is a political novel with an intensely private emotion--a balance Auster as a novelist has mastered quite beautifully over the years.
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