Commentary of Auggie Wren's Christmas Story

Paul Auster is an American writer born in 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, who started to become renowned from the 1980's with novels such as City of Glass (1985) which is one of the novels that compose The New York Trilogy or Leviathan which got him rewarded with the Mecidis Prize.
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story is a short story Paul Auster first wrote for the New York Times Op-Ed page on Christmas Day, 1990. It will be later on edited as a book and adapted as a film called Smoke (1995) by Wayne Wang. This story is very different than other Christmas tales since the author suggests to the reader “an unsentimental Christmas story”. What makes the story so unconventional but so lively and engaging at the same time ? It can be interesting to analyze how complexe and characteristic the narrative structure of this text is, then in which extend it can be said the Christmas spirit is present despite of the author's will to write a particular Christmas story, far from traditional ones.

The story begins with a writer's dilemma : the narrator, Paul, has been asked to write a story that will appear in The New York Times on Christmas morning. The writer agrees but he's quickly confronted to a problem : “The very phrase “Christmas story” had unpleasant associations for <him> […]. Even at their best, Christmas stories were no more than wish-fulfillment dreams, fairytales for adults [...]. And yet, how could anyone propose to write an unsentimental Christmas story ?” (l.65 to l.68) . Uninspired, he unburdens himself to his friend, a mysterious character who works in a cigar store and takes thousands of pictures of the same street corner at precisely the same time every morning named Auggie Wren, who tells him “the best Christmas story <he> ever heard”, a story whose “every word is true” as he says in line 75.
Behind this very simple scenario is actually hiding a more complicated structure. One can indeed split this