La estructura de Moon Palace la hace explícita el narrador de la novela en el párrafo inicial. Como en otras obras de Paul Auster, las primeras líneas funcionan a modo de breve exordio en el que el narrador adelanta algunos de los acontecimientos más importantes que va a desarrollar en las páginas posteriores: «It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As I turned out, I nearly did not make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I wound up living in the streets. If not for a girl named Kitty Wu, I probably would have starved to death. I had met her by chance as a form of readiness, a way of saving myself through the minds of others. That was the first part. From then on, strange things happened to me. I took the job with the old man in...