52 pages • 1-hour read
City of Glass
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse, child death, mental illness, suicidal ideation, and death.
Identity as Constructed and Contingent
In City of Glass, the narrative uses Quinn’s various identities to demonstrate that identity is not a coherent, unified whole inherent to an individual. Rather, it is something that each person constructs, a pastiche made up of the texts and narratives that they absorb or create. For Quinn, these textual layers of identity come primarily from the detective novels that he loves, from which he crafts a “triad of selves”: William Wilson, who is “a kind of ventriloquist”; Quinn himself, who is “the dummy”; and his PI character, Max Work, “the animated voice that [gives] purpose to the entire enterprise” (6). Following the telephone call from Peter, he adds a new identity as Paul Auster, a figment of his own creation, built from his idea of what a real-world PI would be like, to complete the novella’s exploration of identity as a construct, contingent upon context.
Each of Quinn’s identities is contingent upon all the others. Wilson and Work cannot exist without the physical person of Quinn, who created them. Simultaneously, Quinn himself cannot function without the fictional identities of Wilson and Work, through which he mediates his contact with the outside world. This mediation, ironically, later contributes to the isolation he experiences in the city. Over time, Quinn’s own identity doesn’t feel real in the same ways that Wilson and Work have become to him, and therefore, he more easily becomes invisible. The contingent nature of these identities also reveals their reliance on each other as well as the stories that permeate everyone around him. When the case of the two Peter Stillmans ends abruptly, he can no longer fulfill his assumed role as PI Paul Auster, and, in the end, the loss of that one fragment precipitates the loss of all the others, leaving Quinn empty of any identity at all.
The novella’s intertextuality (relationships with other texts) and literary allusions also contribute to Quinn’s textual identity. Quinn’s identity as Paul Auster is based on the detective novel tropes deployed and subverted throughout the narrative. He is also, at his foundation, a pastiche of the character of Don Quixote, mimicking Quixote’s enactments of medieval adventures through his own modern-day quest. The red notebook also contributes to this textuality. It is a literal, concrete text within the narrative, through which Quinn explores his various fragmented identities as they become increasingly fragile.
The novella brings this defragmentation to its most extreme and logical conclusion in the final chapter. Quinn’s identity is revealed to be a construction, a fiction crafted from textual layers and literary references. The red notebook is a literal manifestation of this textual construction of identity. Therefore, when the text ends—both the red notebook and the novella itself—so too does Quinn. He disappears entirely, as if erased from the story, revealing the novella’s message that identity is a construct that, once dismantled, reveals nothing at its core.
Invisibility in a Postmodern City
The setting of New York City is crucial to the novella’s exploration of alienation and invisibility in a postmodern city. In City of Glass, the postmodern city in question is New York City, which the narrative describes in meticulous and exhaustive detail. Through Quinn’s eyes, New York City is a dreamspace, a surreal landscape that is constantly changing and moving, reflecting the fragmentation of a postmodern world. In this space, people may be physically visible but separate from the world around them, unable to escape their own minds to enter the physical world around them; for others, the city is “a place where one could finally disappear” (107). This is the space to which Quinn aspires in the first chapter, when he wishes for the sensation of being lost and therefore free of his own thoughts and memories, a state that he reaches in the final chapter, subverting the trope of unwanted invisibility with his eager acquiescence.
Stillman, like Quinn, views New York as a quintessentially lonely place, calling it “the most forlorn of places, the most abject” and claims that New York is full of broken people, thoughts, and things (77). However, unlike Quinn, Stillman views this state of being with apprehension. He sees the postmodern fragmentation of the city as a thing to be fixed, a wrong to be righted, like fixing the cracked egg of Humpty Dumpty. Stillman and Quinn’s different perspectives on the city exemplify the primary conflict between modern and postmodern modes of thought. In modernist thinking, the fragmentation of reality and identity is a crisis, a problem to be solved. For the postmodernists, such chaos is celebrated and, in Quinn’s case, sought after. Ironically, despite their different feelings about the city, in the end, both Stillman and Quinn are subsumed by the city itself.
They are not alone in this end; nearly every character in the novella disappears into the fabric of the city. The second, prosperous Stillman exits first, his whereabouts and fate unknown after he diverges from the first at the train station. Then the first Stillman disappears, and finally, as Paul Auster informs Quinn, Peter and Virginia Stillman disappear as well. In doing so, they subvert the usually neat conclusions expected in a detective novel, as well as removing that part of Quinn’s identity that adopted the guise of a private investigator. At the same time, Peter and Virginia demonstrate the ways that the fragmented, postmodern urban landscape can render individuals invisible, disappearing from both the city and the narrative without a trace. This is, finally, Quinn’s fate as well, but he chooses to disappear into the city, demonstrating acceptance and even purposefulness in doing so, subverting the typically negative connotations of the anonymity of the city.
The Limits and Ambiguity of Language
City of Glass examines the limits and ambiguity of language through Quinn’s experiences and the wordplay in the narrative itself, as well as Stillman’s philosophies about a prelapsarian language. Quinn first hints at the ambiguity of language in the first chapter when he reflects on the layers of meaning in the colloquialism “private-eye.” According to Quinn, the phrase contains three meanings:
not only was it the letter ‘i,’ standing for investigator, it was ‘I’ in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye […], the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world (8).
He reflects that he has spent five years “living in the grip of this pun” (8), implying that his triad identity (Quinn, Wilson, and Work) is reflected in these various levels of meaning. This examination highlights the way that a single word can both create and conceal meaning. Even the doubling in the narrative, such as the various characters with the same name, contributes to the inherent ambiguity of language. The name “Peter Stillman” contains at least three separate meanings (the son, the father, and the father’s double). So does the name “Daniel,” or the initials DQ, shared by the protagonist, Paul Auster’s son, and Don Quixote.
For the postmodernist, this ambiguity is a source of playfulness and rich possibilities. For Stillman, however, it is at the core of what is wrong with the world, as seen in the fragmented postmodern landscape of New York City. He argues that words have become divorced from the objects they are meant to represent, such that language now distorts and even conceals the truth, rather than accurately representing it. Ironically, Stillman proves his own point in his book, in which he fabricates the writer Henry Dark to present his own ideas under the guise of a 17th-century pamphlet, “The New Babel.” This text, this collection of words, conceals his true identity and purpose. In his book, Stillman ties together the concept of prelapsarian innocence (the innocent state of humanity before they lost the Garden of Eden), the collapse of the Tower of Babel, and the loss of a unified language that accurately represented reality. Through this complex network of ideas, the novella argues that language—contrary to Stillman’s wishes—can never fully encompass reality.
Despite Stillman’s efforts to invent a new language that will more accurately correspond to the objects they are meant to represent, the narrative makes clear that language has its limits. Every language deprivation experiment, including Stillman’s own with his son, has failed to access a perfect, infallible prelapsarian language. The search is always already doomed, just as Quinn’s effort to locate a coherent unified identity is doomed. Quinn’s own surreal, inexplicable experiences only further highlight the limitations of language to accurately encompass the random, strange, and inexplicable parts of the world. Instead, the more desperately each character tries to grasp onto coherence (Stillman to language, Quinn to identity), the more they lose hold of themselves and disappear into the postmodern churn they wish to contain.
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