The fall of the Berlin Wall may have given The Music of Chance a resonance that the author himself could not have anticipated, but in much of his fiction Auster deliberately explores the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictive’. As I have discussed in previous chapters, The New York Trilogy is as much about the literary ghosts that haunt the modern city as it is about the experience of living in it, while In the Country of Last Things presents a collage of cities which have witnessed the progress and the horrors of the twentieth century. These novels may have revealed a bias, on my part as well as Auster's, towards the ‘literary’ rather than the ‘factual’, but they have never been totally detached from the real world. After all, as I have argued, the notion of the intertext is not limited to literary works but embraces processes of fiction-making which have not always been recognised as such. The interaction between the ‘real’ world of history and politics and the world of fiction is given a more prominent position in Moon Palace and Leviathan and, in a different way, also in Mr Vertigo. Although all three are complex narratives encompassing stories within stories, and covering a large time-span that is signposted through references to historical events, the effect is not one of all-inclusiveness. Paradoxically, this panorama of historical and political events is not meant to represent an attempt at mimesis, but serves rather to emphasise subjectivity. In other words, these are narratives that may appear to be ‘grand’ in scale but which seek not to assert their authority, but rather constantly to put it in question. As Chantal Coulomb-Buffa states in relation to Moon Palace, Auster's writing ‘keeps questioning the infinite power of text to generate itself and the impossibility to [sic] reach any original truth’.