Through the form of defamiliarization, Auster attempts to expose the environmental issues that have been ignored by mankind.
It suggests that the imagined dystopian world in the novel serves as a parody of our present world. For instance, the image of homeless people collecting consumer waste by using shopping trolleys symbolizes “a vision of late-capitalist ‘collapse’” and “an industrialist’s true nightmare” (Powell, 1987).
In a New York Times review (1987), Padgett Powell states that In The Country of Last Things is not just apocalyptic because many things match with our present world. He further reveals that the idea of the garbage system in the novel derives from “the present-day garbage system in Cairo” (Hutchisson 12). However, in Conversations with Paul Auster, the author himself claims that this novel is not a science fiction set in the future but in the present, as the subtitle for the novel was “Anna Blume Walks through the Twentieth Century” (12). All fictional characters suffer from the near-total destruction of humanity caused by the lack of natural resources, starvation, social isolation, unpredictable natural disasters, and crimes such as rape and robbery (Herzogenrath 75). Paul Asuter’s In the Country of Last Things is often categorized as a dystopian or an “(post)apocalyptic fiction” as in the novel.
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