چكيده
Women‘s roles in wartime and its aftermath have frequently been ignored due to the nature of war which, because it has been traditionally considered to be an event basically involving men. However, war literature, especially after the Second World War, has tried to highlight women‘s contribution to wars through the numerous roles that they undertake during wars and the following decades. Paul Auster‘s Man in the Dark is a novel about war that includes numerous war stories. These stories altogether contribute to the overall message of the story about the different shape of the world if there were no wars. Most of these war stories are about the miscellaneous effective roles of women during wartime and its aftermath, their contributions to the progress of wars, their victimization as wives and captives, their sufferings as widows and laborers, and their drastic change of identity in accepting new social roles which were traditionally unachievable. These images of women of war make Man in the Dark a novel about women, although it literally seems not to offer any points about women. This study is thus to argue that Auster seems to be presenting himself as a pro-feminist in this novel, a novel which is basically about war and what causes war, in highlighting the roles of women during wartime and how their contributions have been unfairly silenced throughout the history of war.
