Although there remains a possibility that Brill's family will move on to better things, their current situation gives little reason for optimism.
In the frame narrative of Paul Auster's Man in the Dark, August Brill is suffering from insomnia and finds himself telling a story "to keep the ghosts away" instead of writing a memoir, as he promised his daughter he would. Brill feels that he has accomplished little in his life as a writer. He is also haunted by memories of his wife's death, a tragedy that is reflected in the younger generation of his family by the death of his granddaughter's boyfriend in Iraq.
Brill is gloomy, but not hopeless. He makes this observation about his struggle to focus on his work:
Concentration can be a problem, however, and more often than not my mind eventually drifts away from the story I’m trying to tell to...
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the things I don’t want to think about. There’s nothing to be done. I fail again and again, fail more often than I succeed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t give it my best effort.
This may be taken as an assessment of the situation in which Brill and his family find themselves and their chances of moving on to better things. They fail again and and again but have not given up. Further failure seems likely but is not inevitable.
In Man in the Dark, will Brill's family move on to better things? How?
Brill's family will move on to better things, and you know this because the novel ends on a relatively positive note.
In Paul Auster's novel Man in the Dark, life isn't great for the writer and book editor August Brill. A man in his early seventies, Brill has insomnia and must continually face the debilitating consequences of a car accident. Brill's family isn't faring much better. His wife died due to cancer; his sister might have killed herself; his daughter, Miriam, is a struggling writer whose husband has left her; and his granddaughter, Katya, lost her partner to the Iraq War.
All three live in the same house—and they're all quite miserable. However, while Owen Brick's dystopia unfolds, Brill opens up about his marriage, and more warmth and feeling starts to permeate the book.
In the final pages, it's reasonable to argue that Brill's family is prepared to move on to better things. Katya is "coming along," and August and Miriam discuss encouraging her to return to school. Meanwhile, Brill praises Miriam's manuscript about Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter Rose. He also tells her, "You look beautiful when you smile."
Brill's kind words and his suggestion that they go out for breakfast signals that they're ready and willing to confront the world. The optimism of the Brill family is reinforced when Miriam, quoting Rose, says, "The weird world rolls on." It appears as if Brill's family is ready to roll with it.