This dissertation argues that pre- and post-modern authors employ the labyrinth to represent epistemological struggles. The five examined books—St. Augustine of Hippo’s De doctrina christiana and Confessions, Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and Paul Auster’s The City of Glass—use labyrinthine imagery to represent our relationship to mystery, to identify the limits and consequences of a search for understanding, and to implicate their readers in that process. While the selected authors represent the hope of finding one’s way through the labyrinth, they also affirm that our passages need not be directed toward a masterful or a map-like understanding to be rewarding. In fact, the selected authors immerse their iv audiences in a reading process that obstructs interpretive resolution in order to esteem acceptance of human finitude and acknowledgement of incomprehensible mystery.

The first chapter contends that St. Augustine of Hippo utilizes the labyrinth in his treatise on exegesis, De doctrina christiana, to characterize both our use of signs and our living in the world. Augustine suggests that our reading and living do not extricate us from an experience of mystery, so much as enable us to enter into a maze that resists full understanding. The second chapter argues that Augustine composes the Confessions so as to engage the audience in a labyrinthine search for God. He represents that quest as loaded with spiritual consequence, but also suggests that no comprehensive overview permits us to map the order established by God. In chapter three, I turn to Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame that features maze imagery in a depiction of the author struggling to interpret and recount a dream. Chaucer appeals to mazes to discourage efforts to fix the poem’s meaning and indicate that the truth sets us in motion rather than furnishes a fixed position. The fourth chapter takes up Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid in which the readers find a labyrinthine structure. In relation to the maze, Ondaatje links both encounters with mystery and claims to epistemic mastery to violence and eroticism. Finally, in chapter five I argue that the graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass suggests that both epistemic mastery and disregard for the truth lead to our entrapment. The story’s graphic rendering sets readers before a maze-like text and challenges them to find ways through the book that avoid this hazard.

By drawing together these works, it is possible in conclusion to note points of intersection and divergence between pre- and post-modern uses of the maze to characterize our epistemic position vis-à-vis mysteries.