Paul Auster's City of Glass

If I could use one word to describe what Paul Auster’s City of Glass is essentially about, the word would be “identity.” This book plays a game with its readers. Just when you start to think the progression of events are understandable, you discover that even the main character does not understand what is happening to him when everything he thinks he is becomes something else. Quinn, the main character in the book, amongst many other names he goes by, can not seem to find his place in life anymore. Spatially speaking he can’t find his place in New York City anymore as well. It seems that when he lost his apartment, he began to loose himself. When Quinn later returns to his apartment to find that there is a new resident living there, he realizes that “he had come to the end of himself. He could feel it now as if a great truth had dawned in him. There was nothing left” (Auster, 123). He has no family because his wife and child have passed, he has no friends to be mentioned, he no longer has a home, and he no longer has a solid sense of identity to grasp onto.
This book is a trip. The mystery of it all is exciting, as well as frustrating, but overall it was one of my favorite books of the semester. In film as well as in text, I tend to curve towards the genre of mystery and suspense. I enjoy the kinds of films and books that take an effort on my part to understand. I like it when I feel like I am a detective too as part of the script even though I know I am just an audience member. I dislike it when the transition of events are predictable. I want to be shocked and confused at the same time. I want to feel the need to watch the movie or read the book over again so that I can piece together the fragments of the story. City of Glass fits this standard perfectly. With all the different characters wrapped into one, it keeps me guessing who is really who and are some of these characters one in the same. The mystery itself of Quinn trying to save Peter Stillman while battling his own demons of taking on the character of Paul Auster and thus beginning to believe he is someone he is not… or really is. The plot is suspenseful, even just the opening line caught my attention right away, “It was the wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of the night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not” (Auster, 3).
The topic of cognitive disorders struck me as an interest point because I have always been curious into that sort of ailment. I have never known anyone with disassociate identity disorder, but I have had experience with other disorders such as dementia, Alzheimer’s, and bipolar disorder. In high school psychology I learned briefly about many different disorders, one of which was the one Quinn suffers from, and I was reminded me of a movie we were shown in our class called, Identity.
Struggling to find an identity that seems lost is an occurrence in everyone’s lives at some point in time. Many times it can come during a major life changing event or generally at anytime when a person begins to ask themselves the “ultimate questions” such as their purpose in life or their destiny. When certain people are taken from us in this world, it can throw our whole life balance off kilter. Quinn was going through a tough few years after the death of his wife and child, and I can understand how someone like Quinn could be vulnerable enough to develop a disassociate identity disorder when his world was turned upside down. Not only was Quinn the real Paul Auster, whom he went to visit at a certain part in the book, but it was explained in the beginning that Quinn, William Wilson (Quinn’s pen name) and Max Work (the private eye narrator is Quinn’s mystery books) were one in the same person as well. “Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise” (Auster, 6).
Identity is one of the most important themes in the book, and the movie Identity is a mystery/ thriller made in 2003, written by Michael Cooney. The movie is about a man named Malcolm Rivers who is on death row for a series of murders he had committed. The case is still being debated though because his doctor argues that Malcolm has multiple personalities, one of which is a serial killer. The doctor, through therapy, has Malcolm meet all of his multiple personalities into one place. This way the serial killer personality can be brought to the surface and eliminated so that he can be released as a free man.
This movie is like Paul Auster’s City of Glass not only for the disorder similarity, but because all of the characters in the movie found they all had something in common; the same birthdates. In the book, the three characters were connected to each other through the mystery novel Quinn wrote. There were also physical objects that connected the characters together. In Identity, all of the characters had keys which determined who was going to be murdered next. In the book, when Quinn searched for and met up with the “real Paul Auster,” he discovered that Paul’s son resembled his own son who had passed years earlier. For the reader, we were to assume from then on that Quinn was also Paul Auster, and Paul’s son was also Quinn’s son.
On a similar note, the genre of the movie is a mystery, just as City of Glass is. It’s not until the end of the movie I really figured out that all of the characters were the same person. Similarly, I remember when reading this book that I had a difficult time making sense of all of the characters and events, and it wasn’t until the end of the novel I understood that Quinn had disassociate identity disorder.
Peter Stillman Jr. also had similar issues with identity because he was cooped up in a dark room for the first thirteen years of his life. When Quinn tried to make conversation with him it was awkward because he did not have strong social skills and claimed, “I am new everyday. I am born when I wake up in the morning, I grow old during the day, I die at night when I go to sleep” (Auster, 18). This passage makes me think of how Malcolm Rivers must feel from day to day as he goes through all of his different fleeting lives.
When looking at the character Peter Stillman, and how he shared his past with Quinn, and told of the horrible things his father committed onto him, I thought of a recent case in the news that was similar to his experience. In September of 2008, in Austria, a father named Joseph Fritzl was sent to prison for holding captive his daughter Elizabeth, in a cellar below the family home. This mentally ill man locked her up at age 19, and held her as a sex slave and a reproductive agent for 24 years. Given that the intent of Peter Stillman’s father was not the same as Joseph Fritzl’s, the long term effects are comparable. Mr. Stillman Sr.’s plan was to find out if God had a language, and pondered whether a baby might speak it if it saw no people. Peter said that he often makes up his own words just as he did while in seclusion. Once he was released, through therapy he learned how to talk like other people do, but Virginia, Peter’s wife, said that, “He still has the other words in his head. They are God’s language and no one else can speak them. That is why Peter lives so close to God” (Auster, 20). Virginia speaks of the post-traumatic stress caused by his captivity. She says he needed to be taught how to walk, eat, train his mouth to make sounds and words, and the doctors even had to tell him over and over, “Peter Stillman, you are a human being” (Auster, 17).
Similarly in the case of Joseph Fritzl, his daughter Elizabeth bore him seven children, some of which spent their entire lives in that cellar, never seeing the outside. Luckily for Elizabeth she had known what life was really like because it wasn’t until she was 19 that she was taken into the tiny compartment and held captive. Therefore she could teach her children only what she knew. The children still witnessed awful traumatic events, were paralyzed developmentally, and came out with certain ailments that will take extensive medical care to fix. From the reports of the case, the children’s teeth were horribly decayed, and suffer from vitamin D deficiency which is caused by lack of sun exposure, anemia, and bad posture. As a result of the lack of exercise and continuous motion, their bones are weak and deformed. What doctors worry most about is their cognitive and language development. The brain is a sensory organ and needs stimulation to develop. According to Austrian police, “the children learned to talk to themselves in animal-like growls and coos” (Verity, 2).
It would take years of therapy to bring a person back to life from witnessing and suffering such horrific experiences. Just the mere deprivation links Peter Stillman to the Fritzls. These two fathers have stripped these people from their God given rights to life and respect for their humanity. Their post traumatic stress and mental anguish can be compared to the experiences of war, holocaust, and genocide victims. Clearly Peter Stillman has come a long way, given his circumstances, but he still is lost in the head and isn’t fluent in his language and lacks communication skills.
Unlike the victims of the Fritzl family, Peter was in kept in a dark room alone for thirteen years. I think that over time, the dark became somehow comforting to him because he later said, “I still like to be in the dark. At least sometimes. It does me good, I think. In the dark I speak God’s language and no one can hear me” (Auster, 21). Quinn went through a similar experience when he was homeless, living in the alley near the Stillman’s apartment. He could now relate to a vast number of people in New York City who are homeless and are in it alone to fend for themselves. The narrator added to this idea by stating that, “Quinn had always thought of himself as a man who liked to be alone, but it was only now, as his life continued in the alley, that he began to understand the true nature of solitude” (Auster, 115).
John Barth’s insights about postmodern writing and revising traditions can be applied to the way in which Paul Auster wrote because he revised the traditional genre of a mystery novel. There are certain elements needed for a traditional “detective fiction.” When I think of traditional mystery/ detective fictional stories I am reminded of the game Clue where all of the characters have one goal in mind and that is to solve the question of “who-don-it.” The goal of revising such traditions is to, “discover the fallow spaces left under explored in the original, as much as to devise new meanings for the story made possible by the passage of history” (Revising Tradition, 1).
I feel that Paul Auster tries to go against traditional detective mysteries for a number of evidential reasons. In traditional mysteries, as discussed in class, the detective always gets the girl involved in the story. In City of Glass, the only woman that Quinn lays eyes on is Virginia, Peter Stillman’s wife. Virginia actually was the one to initiate a kiss in order to extend her gratitude for all of his help, but that is as far as it went. It seems she only did it to prove a point, and not really to have anything further come of it. The fact that Quinn didn’t seek her out and initiate any of the actions makes him a non-typical detective. I think that when Quinn felt obligated to take up the job of detective Paul Aster in the beginning of the book, he just jumped right into the role and acted as he thought he was supposed to act. He followed Peter Stillman Senior around the streets of New York City and collected what he thought to be clues off of the street. He even thought the letters of the “Tower of Babel” were inscripted in the pattern of his stride. All of these elements do seem like traditional approaches to solving a crime, but City of Glass took the story to a greater extent. There was much more intertwined into the plot such as the multiple personalities of the main character, the background story of Quinn himself and his deceased wife and child, and the background story of Peter Stillman and his mentally ill father. Ultimately in the end Quinn failed which is also untypical of detective novels, and he didn’t save Peter’s life. He actually even went on for quite some time while in the alley, not knowing that Peter had already died, which would seem very unprofessional to a true detective.
John Barth wrote a short story called, Lost in the Funhouse, and while one may not think there are any connections to be made between that and City of Glass, there are. The title alone can be applied to Paul Auster’s work because while the idea of taking on the identity of a detective can seem fun and exhilarating, it consequentially made Quinn feel very lost and confused about the turn of events and about himself. Another area of similarity is that just as Quinn didn’t end up with a mistress by the end of the story, neither did Ambrose the main character of Lost In the Funhouse. He wanted to be the one to take his crush, Magda, through the fun house, but she was already taken by someone else. At a point Ambrose left the funhouse, and watched as all the people on the boardwalk were paired off into couples. At this point the felt left out and loathed a companion for himself. He was lonely and confused, be it a 13 year old boy, right around the age of puberty. Quinn felt alone and confused at a point in time as well when he was staying in the alley outside of the Stillman’s apartment. When he was in the trash can during the storms, he would peer out of the tin cover and watch the people walk past while they led normal lives uninterrupted with matters such like his.
John Barth talks a lot about mirrors in Lost in the Funhouse. The narrator says that, “in the funhouse mirror-room, your can’t see yourself go on forever, because no matter how you stand, your head gets in the way” (Barth, 85). The idea of mirrors is important to both this short story and City of Glass because by the end of Lost in the Funhouse Ambrose concludes that, “as he wondered at the endless replication of his image in the mirrors,…he lost himself in the reflection” (Barth, 94).
All along I’ve wondered about the title of Paul Auster’s book and I think that given this last statement by Ambrose, a connection can be made to Quinn’s world and New York City that is full of mirrors (glass). We can only rely on mirrors to show us who we are. Quinn is spatially lost in New York City, and mentally lost, detached from his real single self. He is surrounded by mirrors, metaphorically speaking, but he cant seem to see himself in any of them because his head keeps getting in the way.

Self-awareness in "Veronica"

What I like most about David Foster Wallace and Mary Gaitskill’s writing is how self-aware they are about either themselves or the world around them. When we heard Wallace read aloud the story of the baton twirlers at the Illinois state fair, my mind was indulged in his words and the vivid imagery he created. I find it amazing how he can get so much out of a simple event such as a baton twirling contest, and how he could make so many comparisons to things in his memory and things that he has seen outside of the event. For example, when he analyzes the makeup of the hard rubber ends of the batons and relates it to the batons police men use as weapons. Wallace makes me think of the kind of person who gets enjoyment out of sitting on a bench in the mall all day observing people as they walk by and listening to the conversations they have with each other. Like Mary Gaitskill, they both can see emotions in people just by looking at them, even in the ones who hide it well. Mary Gaitskill writes about Allison and her encounters with the German model. Allison could tell she was lonely and depressed inside even though she has such as “beautiful” face to hide it. Mary Gaitskill also presents Allison as being very self-aware and she can recognize parts of herself such as when she talks about her definition of beauty and how it is different than the definition some of the people she lived with give. The German model saw this and felt comfortable talking to her because Allison was able to look at her and not only her “beautiful” exterior. I am enjoying reading Veronica because I feel like I can relate to it, mostly because the author lets us and allows us to get inside of the main character, and how she views herself the people around her.

My Backwards Progression of Music

Since childhood I have been surrounded by my parent’s generation of music. My dad always played Janis Joplin, The Beatles, Bob Marley and Bob Dylan around the house, amongst many other musical groups. This was the type of music I listened to before I really began to define my own interest in music. I definitely went through phases of musical genres throughout middle school and high school trying to figure out where my niche was. Many times I tried to conform my interests to what my friends and peers were interested in, but as I got older I began to get back to my roots which were the legendary artists of the 1960’s and 70’s that I grew up around. I find myself moving backward in time in terms of music rather then forward and it is only recently within the past few years that this began to happen. I still like many of the artists I experimented with, but I find myself more likely to purchase a Bob Dylan CDs then one of the current popular artist’s. It’s a very atypical way of progressing through music, but that’s where I have found my niche, and I enjoy trying to relate to my parent’s generation in order to better understand what they were all about at my age.

Graphic Design Through Time

Melanie Helgerson
Techno-culture
After our discussion on techno culture and how much technology has changed our world and the way we view it, it got me thinking about my own world and how much it has changed within my major of graphic design. When I was in high school I took a few years worth of graphics classes. To compare those classes to the graphics classes in college it is like night and day. In high school we learned the old, outdated process of how graphic designs were made, in order to appreciate their roots, and also because art wasn’t an important part of the school’s budget, and the school couldn’t afford all new equipment. The process is so much quicker now; you design something on the computer using the various creative suite programs, and print it out on the printer. To make a change, you just go back into the document, change it and print out a new one. Back in the day though, before there were computer generated images, it was all drawn out by hand. Then from those drawings a negative was made in the dark room. Next a metal plate was made by burning the image onto it using a chemical that smelt like a dirty diaper I might add. Lastly, the metal plate was run through the printing press one ink color at a time and after each color the stack of papers had to be realigned and fed through the press again so that the colors were perfectly layered over one another. Needless to say it was a lot of work, and if you found out later in the process that you accidentally misspelled a word, you had to go all the way back to step one and start over. Now the process just seems to easy, but I am thankful that I got to experience the old school way of making a graphic design so that I now have a greater appreciation for the new innovated technology.

Dana's Other Options

In our discussion group today we discussed the different choices Dana had which would project a different outcome in the events that transpired. We thought that she should have tried harder towards the begining of the book to make free papers for herself and by doing so, if the fake papers worked, she should have made copies for the slaves on the plantation before Rufus was killed. Dana and Kevin thought of making free papers, but the idea was put aside, partly because they had a hard time finding records that contained official papers, but also with Dana coming and going so quickly she probably didn't have time to look more into it. If the timeline of events would have happened that way though, everyone would have had a better chance to be free once the plantation owner was no longer in existence. It says later in the epilogue that everyone was sold, except for Nigel and Carrie, and Joe and Haggard. Nigel's sons were sold, as well as Sara. The only problem would be that none of them would have anywhere to go if they were free. The plantation was their home, and with their lack of education they would run into trouble trying to find work. Also, some of the slaves didn't have a family anymore, or their kindred was scattered all over the place. Nonetheless, they would be free and that's a start. It's hard to say whether it would have been better for everyone if things happened in a different way, there is always some obstacle to overcome when making any kind of difficult decision, but Dana did have options, and while she did so much already for the slaves on the plantation, there is a chance she could have done even more. She did inspire a lot of the people around her though, and sometimes, just having a different mindset is all it takes for you to endure the rest of your survival in tough times.

The Motherly Role Dana Took On

The more Dana was present throughout Rufus’ life, the more Dana took on a very motherly role to not only Rufus but also some of the slave children on the plantation. Alice even mistook her for her mother when she called out “mammy” as she nursed Alice from the pain she had endured. Dana cared for the children not only like a doctor would, bandaging up bruised ribs and healing sore wounds, but also as a social worker, as a listener and as a friend who gave advise and prevented the children from making bad decisions. When Alice decided for herself the best thing to do was to go to Rufus that night, it was because Dana had presented all of the possible consequences to her if she did or didn’t, but never made the decision for her. Dana was the only person the slaves felt comfortable talking to, so comfortable that they could take out all of their anger on her knowing that she would rather take it than let them take it out on the wrong person at the wrong time. “Why you let me run you down like that? You done everything you could for me, maybe even saved my life…and you’re the only one I can take it out on, the only one I can hurt and not get hurt back.” Because Dana knew what the future would be like, she was able to inspire the children with confidence knowing that things would soon be getting better one day. Her purpose may have only been to save Rufus, but in turn she ended up saving more people than she bargained for just by staying the positive and caring person she was, showing motherly love to many of the people she encountered.

Midterm Blog Paper

If I were to compare my past writing and analyzing experience to my present, I would argue that it hasn’t changed dramatically, but it is gradually getting keener as time goes on. As a freshman, in my written communications classes, we wrote long analysis papers on the various stories we read and learned how to compare them to real life in order to better understand and appreciate the stories. For one assignment in particular, we were asked to find a movie and compare it to one of the stories we had read and jot down specific quotes and their locations in the film in order to make our case. Also, in Paul Gleason’s Introduction to Lit class we compared the elements in actual well-known pieces of artwork to the elements in the literature we were reading. So, throughout all the English and literature classes I have taken here since I was a freshman, I was taught that it isn’t enough to just find commonalities between texts but between different forms that are not text based but still tell a story. Because of these classes, I have gained a greater amount of experience with working on different levels of analysis which helps me to write my blogs with greater ease, but I am still learning how to make a more solid argument or how to form a more precise opinion on things without sounding like I am generalizing.
I also have a great interest in films, and I tend to migrate towards the kind of movies that make you think, and force you to watch it over again in order to tie up loose ends. I like when movies jump all around in the timelines and you have to organize it yourself to make it all come together. An example of this that we have all in the classroom have seen is “Pulp Fiction,” which does exactly what I am talking about. These kind of movies sharpen my analytical thinking skills and keep my brain working while I enjoy the thrill of the experience. Therefore, I think that watching these types of films also helps me with my writing in a backwards way because it forces me to write in an organizational and structured manner so that the reader can follow what I am talking about and does not have to read it again to tie up loose ends. I am glad that I was able to take the classes that I took and have gotten to experience the mind bottling films I have seen in order to improve my writing and analytical skills, but there will always be some facet where I can improve upon.
I feel that in the course of writing my blogs all three of the stages of reading development were dispersed evenly throughout my writing. Some of my blogs were clear cut examples of the stages and some overlapped and intermingled with each other. Right in the beginning, my first blog could be viewed as working in the “text-world” stage. I wrote about how our class discussion on women in real times have been stripped of power, and contrasted it to the women in the movie “Moulin Rouge” who had gained all the power over the men at their place of business, with their attention grabbing costumes and seductive bodily movements.
Going along with this stage, in my most recent blog, I reflected on the movie “Brokeback Mountain” and compared the issues of homosexuality then to the current homosexuality issues of today. I used P.A.T.H. as an example which was a club in my high school that included mostly homosexual members, and I talked about how the people in that group fell into a certain social crowds. I then opened it up further to outside of my high school and made the claim that most homosexuals today are finding themselves more accepted in the artistic world because of the way artists encourage expressionist ideas and concepts. Therefore in this blog I turned from the “text-self” stage when I was talking about me and my experience, to the “text-world” stage where I was talking about the rest of the world and where people find the most acceptance. The only issue I have with writing in the “text-world” stage is that I tend to lack in the thorough explanation my ideas and opinions by not providing enough examples, and I end up making myself look like I am stereotyping or generalizing the issues and the people that I am writing about. An example of this is in my pop/high culture analysis where I related it to the movie “Pulp Fiction.” I did acknowledge that what I was about to say would sound like a stereotype, but I made the judgment that “Pulp Fiction” would be a little too taboo for conservative high culture crowds. It was inaccurate of me to say because I didn’t give enough examples of why it would be that way, and I should have thought harder to come up with how it could be part of high culture too, so as to even the playing field. This is something that I need to work on in my upcoming blogs.
I touched on idea of comparing one text to other texts and their forms when I wrote about the gift of tongues in Paul Auster’s book, and when I made a connection between writing a screen play in class to watching the stage rehearsals of the movie “Juno.” In regards to the gift of tongues comparison, I learned about this gift when writing a paper for another class on the religious denomination called Pentacostalism. I took that information into account when reading over certain parts of Paul Auster’s story and used specific quotes from the book that exemplified the connection I was trying to make. In my other blog about the movie “Juno,” I related the exercise we did in class of making our own screen plays to watching the characters in the movie act out what they were reading from their scripts. Making this comparison really exemplified the experience because it showed me an example of the next step in the filmmaking process. This stage of reading development, I think, is the easiest for me because I am constantly thinking of things that I have seen, or read and using them to mirror what I am reading or watching currently.
The only blog that I have not yet mentioned is the one where I discussed how metafiction is shown in the book by Jonathan Lethem, “You Don’t Love Me Yet.” Here I just simply analyzed the term metafiction we were throwing around in class and explored how it was shown in certain scenes of the book. Within this blog I also gave my personal opinion of my like or dislike for the book, and that is the main reason why I categorized this blog into the “text-self” stage of reading development. An entry that can overlap into this category though is the one about P.A.T.H. because I talked about my personal experience from real life with this group in high school and what I observed about the members of the group. Many of these blog entries that I have written can overlap into all or some of the three stages in minute or large ways. Altogether though, I feel that I evenly distributed my writing over all of the stages in different ways.
Going forward from here on out, there are a few things that I could definitely work on in my writing and analyzing. Like I had mentioned before, I need to make my arguments or opinions less one sided and make sure that I use enough examples to explain my reasoning, or find more examples of how my initial observations may be incorrect. I don’t want to ever insult someone reading my blogs, since we sometimes cover touchy subjects, or give them the wrong impression about what I am trying to get across. Something that I think will also help is having more class discussions. After reading Paul Auster’s book and Jonathan Letehem’s novel, “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” we didn’t discuss the reading as much as we did make graphic novels and write screen plays in response to the text. Once we have a class discussion on these works, it releases any questions that I might have and clear up any misconceptions about what the characters meant by their words or actions before I start writing. I would like to stay in the last two stages of reading development for my upcoming blogs and challenge myself to improve where I need improvement. I think the introduction of “blogging” for a class is a neat tool because it makes you feel like your thoughts are important by having your own profile to display them and it allows others to be able to read and comment on them. It also makes the feedback process quicker and easier. I wish more classes would integrate “blogging” into their curriculum.