City of Glass
Story by Paul Auster
Essay by Vanessa Jagna Hoff Levinsen

In this essay, we will be working with Paul Auster’s novel “City of Glass”. In the story, we follow the character Daniel Quinn, whose occupation is writing literature. This novel works with different themes that are related to mental health. The first theme we will be talking about is a question of identity; who am I, and who are you? We will follow this with describing human contact’s connection with the sanity of mankind. Social life and its influence on our mentality will lead us to the question of the masks of mankind; who is the real personality among the many faces of a single human. We will also discuss the theme of deciding. What crucial decisions have lead to the life we now live, and what could have been, if our stories had taken place just a tiny bit differently. Last but not least we will go into depth with Quinn’s mental disorder and how it is related to the other characters in the novel.

Can a single, presumably random incident change the entire course of our lives? We all have one or more events that changed the entire direction of our own personal tales of existence. It can be a moment of clarity, where we realised we had lived our lives wrong the entire time. It could be the moment we bumped into that special someone, and fell in love. Or maybe it was that day when you received a rather odd phone call; let us say that perhaps you got a phone call from someone who looked for a detective? In Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” this is exactly what happened to the main character, Daniel Quinn.

In the narrative “City of Glass” we hear the tale of an ordinary author who writes potboilers. Daniel Quinn is a 35 year-old man, who lost his spouse and child five years prior the novel’s timeline. In his youth, likely while he still had his wife and son, he had been a very productive writer, who published books of poetry, had written plays, and even made critical essays. But with time, he lost his ambition.

“A part of him had died, he told his friends, and he did not want it coming back to haunt him. It was then that he had taken on the name of William Wilson.” (Page 4, line 21-24)

As we can read in the quote, Quinn takes on a new persona by the name William Wilson. The reason why he decided to change who he is, is not specified in the novel, but one can assume that it might be a result of the emotional trauma caused by losing his close family. But this raises the question – and reoccurring theme in the story – Who are we? Many people identify with their birth name, and by changing that, they change who they are. But how can a simple name have such a huge impact on our behavior? Later in the novel, Quinn also starts behaving like his own fictional character, the detective “Max Work”. This is the result of him being put into a situation where a detective was required. All of a sudden Quinn becomes a professional at solving cases, simply by taking on a different name. The ability to change personality suggests that our main character might suffer from dissociative identity disorder. This mental disorder is usually a result of severely emotionally damaging situations, which in Quinn’s case could be his loss of loved ones. After losing his family, he lost his friends over time. When humans refrain from contacting other individuals of mankind, they are left with their own thoughts, and no one to tell them what is right and wrong. They will develop their true nature, and are often led into insanity.

Humans behave differently depending on the situation you put them in. The only contrast between this and Quinn’s situation is that Quinn has given these disparate masks names. But is there a way to tell who the “real” personality is? A good assumption is that Quinn’s main personality is “Quinn”, but ruminating that we, as humans, change our behavior depending on who we are around, the only way to know who the core personality is, would be leaving the person alone for a longer period of time, until they find themselves. Taking this into consideration, Quinn’s main personality is not actually “Quinn”, but rather the character he became after his isolation, which is “Wilson”. This also means that Quinn would not have found out who he truly is, if he had not lost his family. But in this story we have the option of seeing whom Quinn could have become if his wife and son were still alive, through the character “Paul Auster”.

“It was a pleasant enough place inside: oddly shaped, with several long corridors, books cluttered everywhere, pictures on the walls by artists Quinn did not know, and a few children’s toys scattered on the floor – a red truck, a brown bear, a green space monster.” (Page 93, line 33-36)

From this quote we can assume that Auster still has his interest in literature and arts, unlike our protagonist, and we can also assume that Auster has a kid. Judging from the toys on the floor, it is likely a boy, just like Quinn’s late child. We also know that Auster is married, which is one more parallel to the life Quinn used to live. On page 95, Quinn explains what led him to Auster, and Auster thereafter claims that if he had been in the same situation as Quinn, he would have done the same. This shows there is certainly a connection between the characters, almost like a Schrodinger’s cat case. A human living a life until the option of a living family or dead family is presented to us. We do not know if the family lives or not until they are observed. In this story, instead of deciding on the fate of family, the human split into more humans, living parallel lives, but with the variable of their family’s state of existence.

The narrative is an anti-detective novel in the sense that we have a case of sorts placed before us, and we even have someone to be our detective, but be by the end of the story, we are never told if the suspect is caught, or if the crime ever took place. The crime we are dealing with has not taken place yet, and our detective is not even a detective. The narrator of the novel is assumingly a trustworthy Olympic describer. A hidden narrator with no role in the story whatsoever, but who mainly focuses on Daniel Quinn’s point of view. But this all changes on the last two pages of “City of Glass”. All of a sudden we find out that the teller of the tale was a first-person narrator all along. The entire tale is changed from reliable to unreliable. And not only is it a first-person narrator, but the storyteller is not even telling their own story, but Quinn’s story, which they found in a red notebook. This means the first-person narrator, is telling us a narrative they got from another first-person narrator, meaning that it is not unbelievable that the entire tale is made up and has no truth in it whatsoever.

We have already discussed Daniel Quinn, and Paul Auster, but the other characters in the novel is equally relevant. Let us begin with Daniel Auster, Paul’s son.

“The boy burst into laughter, ’Everybody’s Daniel!’
‘That is right’ said Quinn. ‘I’m you, and you’re me.’”(Page 102, line 8-9)

This could mean that all the characters in the novel are in fact fragments of Quinn, created by his lack of sanity. We also meet Peter Stillman Jr.. He is said to have a monotone way of speaking, and robotic movements. This could the result of being abused by his father as a child. Peter Stillman Sr., Stillman Jr.’s father, is man of religion, and has a strong desire to find the language of God. Stillman Sr. is a madman who, after his wife’s death, decided to make the most absurd experiment in the search of the original language of mankind, from before the fall of the Tower of Babel. He performed these experiments on his son. Considering that Stillman Jr. reminded Quinn of his own son, and Stillman Sr. had a wife, Stillman Sr. could be who Quinn would have become if it had only been his wife had died. We also have the only living lady of the story, Virginia Stillman, the wife of Stillman Jr.. Virginia is a beautiful, but mysterious woman, who Quinn is attracted to immediately, and later out it turns out the attraction is mutual.

In the photograph “Decentered Man” we see Paul Auster’s father. In the photo you see five of the same man, sitting in a circle, possibly around a table. Although there are five of Auster’s father, we cannot get eye contact with a single one of them. They all look into empty space, making them almost unidentifiable, or rather, invisible. In the picture, it looks as if the person who sits with his back towards us, is sitting in front of a mirror, and for some reason, the reflection shows four alternative versions of him. To sum it up, you have a single man, who has more than one reflection. Auster’s father has his in a mirror, while Quinn’s reflections are shown in the book’s reality. Antal | Fejltype | Tekst | 1 | | interesting analogy | 1 | | good stuff! | 1 | | It is better just to write eg. "This essay focuses on" | 1 | | spørgsmålstegn | 1 | | - | 1 | | most | 1 | Kongruens | Kongruens - der skal være overensstemmelse mellem subjekt og verballed i tal og person. |

This essay was a pleasure to read. Your writing is very independent, but nonetheless right on track. You might have drawn in an analysis of the story as an anti-detective story, and perhaps something about postmodernism or something from one of the interviews, but on the other hand you are perfectly lucid on your own.