City of Glass by Paul Auster Essay - 1549 Words

The New York Triology: City of Glass By Paul Auster City of Glass is a novel written by Paul Auster in 1985, and its one of the stories included in the series of novels The New York Trilogy (1987). One of the essential themes that recur in many of Austers works is the search for identity and personal meaning, and this is exactly one of the main elements of City of Glass. It deals with this detective writer, who descends into madness when he becomes a private investigator himself by mistake. In the following essay, I will focus on the characters and the very twisted point of view, which is a big part of the whole novel. Besides that, I will concentrate on the themes that are dealt with in the story. City of Glass is about the 35 years†¦show more content†¦One of the other persons you don’t hear a lot about, but who still plays a big role in the whole story, is the actual Paul Auster. He is the one that Stillman Jr. meant to call, but because of a problem with the phone lines he got Quinn instead, who just went with it. Paul Auster is also a writer, and when Quinn informs him about the case and the situation, he starts helping out by drawing possible conclusions and giving advice. He gets worried when Quinn disappears, but at the same time he does not really make an effort to find him. The last, important character in the novel, the narrator, who appears in the end, where he/she has just returned from a trip to Africa, also points this out. He/she accuses Auster to be indifferent to Quinn after hearing the whole story, and it is him/her who comes up with the idea of Quinn being at the Stillmans house. Although he/she is the one person in the novel who has the most trivial relationship to Quinn, he/she is the one who cares the most. The centre and the main character in the story is Daniel Quinn, but he is referred to in 3rd person, which means that he is not the narrator. The narrator does not appear before the end of the novel, where he/she goes from implicit to explicit. This â€Å"I† suddenly comes out of a context in which it has always existed, but never spoken directly. The narrator is evidently a friend of Paul Auster,Show MoreRelatedA Lacanian Analysis of Paul Austers New York Trilogy4021 Words   |  17 Pagesoccurs in language. This alienation happens as a consequence of the relation of the subject to the symbolic order. Paul Auster, is a famous American postmodern writer whose The New York Trilogy is the story of fragmentation and unknowable selves, it is also a desperate attempt to yoke these selves into a unity through language. The form of the three interwoven stories, City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room which culminates into a trilogy under the name of New York, is a tableau which shows theRead MoreA Lacanian Analysis of Paul Austers New York Trilogy4030 Words   |  17 Pagesin language. This alienation happens as a consequence of the relation of the subject to the symbolic order. Paul Auster, is a famous American postmodern writer whose The New York Trilogy is the story of fragmentation and unknowable selves, it is also a desperate attempt to yoke these selves into a unity through language. The form of the three interwoven stories, City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room which culminates into a trilogy under the name of New York, is a tableau which shows theRead MorePost Modernism and City of Glass2761 Words   |  12 PagesThere is no clear definition of what postmodernism is. However, City of Glass is considered to be the by far the text which is most visibly postmodernism. 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