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.
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.
