52 pages • 1-hour read
City of Glass
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Literary Devices
Literary Allusions
As part of its metafictional construction and its themes of textuality, City of Glass uses a variety of literary allusions. The first of these is its use of detective genre tropes and character archetypes throughout the narrative. These include the character of Max Work, Quinn’s fictional private investigator character, and Quinn’s own assumed role as the PI Paul Auster, as well as Virginia’s role as a femme fatale, and Stillman’s role as the villain or culprit. In all these cases, however, the narrative subverts these tropes: Quinn is not truly a PI but a writer playacting as one, and despite the single kiss Virginia gives Quinn, she makes no further efforts to seduce him. She also doesn’t appear to be conspiring against Peter in any overt way, as Quinn at first suspects. Finally, the villain, Stillman, ultimately disappears from the text, as do Peter and Virginia, leaving Quinn with a case that no longer has a victim or a culprit.
In addition to detective novels, City of Glass makes allusions to a wide variety of literary texts, including Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe, the Essays of Montaigne, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and most explicitly, Don Quixote. All these literary allusions accrue, adding to the intertextual layers of ideas, tropes, and storytelling techniques that form the novella’s own narrative structures. This kind of intertextuality is an important feature of postmodern literature, which highlights the relationship between texts and narratives. In this way, postmodern literature demonstrates that no creative endeavor exists isolated, in a vacuum, but rather within an interdependent network of stories and ideas in conversation with each other.
Pastiche
Another important literary technique deployed in City of Glass is the pastiche, in which a literary work imitates or takes on aspects of another literary work or genre, such as plot structure, characters, styles, or, in some cases, even specific scenes. Whereas parody mimics a literary text to mock or criticize it, a pastiche tends to be either value-neutral or positive in its portrayals, often used as a kind of homage. In postmodern literature, pastiche brings components of different recognizable works together to create a new kind of story. Pastiche is connected to, and often arises out of, literary allusions. In this case, the narrative’s reliance on detective novel tropes is both allusion and pastiche, particularly when character archetypes and tropes, such as scenes of tedious investigation, are combined with other elements.
However, the primary source of pastiche in the novella is Don Quixote. In Chapter 10, Paul Auster’s discussion of Don Quixote’s layers of authorship contributes to the metafictional nature of the novella. More importantly, it makes apparent, at least in retrospect, the blatant parallels between Don Quixote and City of Glass. Daniel Quinn is a pastiche of Don Quixote, not merely because they share the same initials but because Quinn, like Quixote, becomes obsessed with his chosen literary form and decides to enact those stories in his own life. Ironically, in Chapter 13, Quinn wonders why Quixote did not simply write books like those he lived rather than trying to “liv[e] out their adventures” (127), oblivious to the fact that he has done the very same thing when he assumed the identity of Paul Auster. Additionally, the unknown narrator who chronicles Quinn’s experiences after finding Quinn’s red notebook is a pastiche of the fictional author of Don Quixote, Cid Hamete Benengeli.
Setting
A third significant literary technique in City of Glass is the use of setting. The novella’s setting of New York City is crucial to the characterization, plot, and themes, so much so that New York City becomes almost a character in itself. Large sections of exposition describe Quinn’s and later Stillman’s walks through the streets. These passages are meticulous in detail, providing visual and sensory descriptions as well as clear references to cross-streets and directions. New York City is described as “an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps” (4), and later, Stillman states that New York is “the most forlorn of places, the most abject” (77). He claims that New York is typified by brokenness, “the broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts” (77).
Both characterizations of the city contribute to the theme of Invisibility in a Postmodern City. Quinn and Stillman both view New York as a place of isolation and loneliness, where people can quickly become lost and disappear. For Stillman, this is a tragic state he wishes to fix, along with his efforts to fix the brokenness of language. For Quinn, however, this is the city’s primary appeal. His favorite hobby is to wander the streets in an effort to feel, if not literally become, lost. In Chapter 11, Quinn’s extensive passage in the red notebook details his walks through New York after losing Stillman, in which he sees the “beggars and performers [and] hulks of despair” who live on the streets with renewed interest (107). The streets of New York are a world unto themselves, where some become lost, and others become trapped. Quinn remarks, “perhaps that is a place where one could finally disappear” (107), in a tone that suggests longing rather than fear.
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