Lost in the Labyrinth:
Authoring of Identity in the Works of Paul Auster
by
Bradley S. Lewis
San Francisco, California
December 2007
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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II. Chapter One: Authoring Identity in The Invention of Solitude. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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III. Chapter Two: City of Glass: Lost in the Labyrinth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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IV. Chapter Three—Postcript: The Formation of the Storyteller in Moon Palace. . . .
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V. Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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VI. Works Cited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Introduction
“At bottom, I think my work has come out of a position
of intense personal despair, a very deep nihilism and hopelessness
about the world, the fact of our own transience and mortality, . . .
the isolation of one person from another. And yet, at the same time,
I’ve wanted to express the beauty and extraordinary happiness of
feeling yourself alive.”
- Paul Auster
If, as Auster says, all of his work emerges from this sense of personal despair, his
memoir, The Invention of Solitude (IS), which is his first major work, addresses this feeling
through themes that reappear in his subsequent novels. This is particularly apropos to the second
half of the memoir, “The Book of Memory,” in which Auster struggles to situate himself via a
written inquiry into his past as a means of working through personal crises that include his
father’s death, his divorce, and the hospitalization and impending death of his maternal
grandfather. The text develops into an inquiry upon the subject of memory which delves into the
field of influences that have contributed to the shaping of his identity as a means to contextualize
himself within a larger framework. The memoir thus becomes, in part, an explication of the past,
but more significantly it develops into a meditation upon the nature of memory and the necessity
to explore its depths and interpret the past through the process of writing. Ilana Shiloh
comments, “The Invention of Solitude. . . offers the blueprint for all his subsequent works,” and
she points to the central “theme and narrative pattern adumbrated in The Invention of Solitude:
the quest and the mystery of the self” (14).
In Auster’s memoir, the quest takes on the form of an internal deliberation through the
labyrinth of memory in solitude which enables a process of self-recovery during his period of
crisis. The quest is therefore characterized as a descent into the darkness of solitude that is
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integral to Auster’s creative process and helps him work through his despair. His journey is not
represented via a clear linear framework, but rather, the path into the self is fragmented,
labyrinthine, associative, and inherently unstable. He attempts to represent this circuitous path
through a reflective writing process that emphasizes the instability of identity and leaves gaps in
the text as a way to represent the transient and selective nature of memory that can never be
finalized, but rather, is always subject to continuous reflection and reinterpretation. Auster is
cognizant of the seemingly impossible task of creating a narrative structure to represent the
associative and open-ended character of a journey into the past, yet he manages to create a poetic
framework of correspondences that capture the elusive and mysterious connections that have
marked his life.
Auster’s reflective search as a writer can only take place in solitude, and it is within this
solitary space that he is able to establish a vital relationship between an exploration into the vast
interior realm of memory and the need to inhabit its winding corridors in order to draw upon his
imagination as part of the process of working through the past through writing. The text
explores the importance of storytelling and narrative construction such that an individual is,
consciously or not, continually authoring his life through a negotiation of personal, social,
historical, and fictional narratives. Auster remarks, “you don’t begin to understand your
connection to others until you are alone. And the more intensely you are alone, the more deeply
you plunge into a state of solitude, the more deeply feel that connection” (309). Solitude is
therefore free of negative connotations for Auster, but is instead an essential human condition
that involves an opportunity to dwell with oneself in order to recognize the wealth of connections
and influences that have helped shape the self. An integral part of the process of feeling his
connections in solitude and moving beyond the confines of a strictly personal narrative includes
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Auster’s incorporation of literary influences in his texts. The inclusion of these influences
carries the text beyond his personal history and signifies his broader and richer sense of
connection to history that is not prosaically represented and temporally consistent, but rather, is
fragmented and repetitive, poetic and meditative.
An important adjunct to the multitude of references within the memoir is Auster’s choice
to speak of himself in the third person as ‘A.’ This places him within the text as a central
character and serves to emphasize the extent to which both personal and literary influences have
helped shape his identity. Auster emphasizes, “Our lives don’t really belong to us, you see –
they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place
beyond our understanding” (AH 279). Therefore, writing about himself in the third person serves
a dual purpose: it is a way for Auster to represent how one’s identity essentially remains
mysterious because it has been formed by numerous factors that are beyond complete
accessibility and comprehension; and it allows a measure of distance from himself in order for
him to select important details and influences while creating a poetic framework that apprehends
the associative nature of memory. Auster comments that, “The Invention of Solitude is
autobiographical, of course, but I don’t feel that I was telling the story of my life so much as
using myself to explore certain questions that are common to us all: how we think, how we
remember, how we carry our pasts around with us at every moment” (300). His emphatic
reminder to “Remember” (172), the memoir’s final word which stands alone, reinforces this
sense of the importance to realize that the past always remains present within us and is open to
further interrogation and interpretation. Therefore, rather than remain unconsciously in the grip
of unresolved elements of the past, he implores the importance to be both a witness to and active
participant with one’s past in a process that self-referentially engages in a reconstruction of the
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past through the act of writing.
The themes that emerge through Auster’s struggle to work through a period of crisis in
the writing of his memoir persist in his novels. His protagonists are faced with similar identity
crises which they either successfully navigate by working through their respective pasts to open
themselves to the future, or which they fail to navigate and therefore remain cut off from the past
and subsequently lose the ability to imagine and direct themselves toward a future through
participation in the present. His protagonists often mirror A.’s travails in “The Book of
Memory” by reaching a point of oblivion and despair which they must work through, specifically
through an act of narration, as a means to explore the self and refashion their identities in order
to strive to imagine and create a future for themselves. While Auster foregrounds the importance
of solitude as a site of recovery and working through in his memoir, in City of Glass he posits the
detrimental and tragic effects of failing to dwell in solitude through the main character, Quinn.
These effects do not merely focus upon Quinn’s writing, but are concerned with his daily
functioning as a human being because of his failure to deal with the emotional affects of his past.
Through Auster’s own statement about Quinn serving as an alternate self had he not met his
second wife, I look at Quinn as the antithesis to ‘A.’ of The Invention of Solitude in chapter two.
In a letter to Dennis Barone about critical responses to his work, Auster comments that
critics “confuse the thoughts and statements of the characters in my books with my own beliefs. .
. . As far as I was concerned, Quinn’s approach to writing was an example of his alienation – his
terrible distress and sadness as a man” (Beyond the Red Notebook 14). Quinn, though living
alone in a room, does not inhabit himself and his memories, but denies his internal world and
access to his past through the serendipitous adoption of the identity of a detective. This act
marks a heightened level of dissociation from himself and leads to his disappearance because of
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his complete severance from his memories, friends, and former literary career. His adoption of
this identity is connected with his flight from engaging with the ambiguities and contradictions
inherent in the process of interpreting his past in favor of a search for absolute transparency and
wholeness. This search encompasses a desperate need to believe in deductive and rational
solutions, and it builds into an obsessive quest that protects him from the nebulous and
uncomfortable journey into the realm of memory. The inability to deal with his affects leaves
Quinn in a state of timelessness because he foregoes an ongoing internal narrative and therefore
remains unable to re-invent and represent himself as Auster strives to do in The Invention of
Solitude. Because Quinn represses his past and therefore does not investigate or interpret it, he
fails to mourn the losses of his wife and son and does not recontextualize his relationship with
these past traumas through the process of writing.
Quinn’s repression of his past as a poet develops into a linguistic regression to the extent
that he seeks transparency in language in his external search for stabile and secure signs of
representation as an escape from the unstable process of re-experiencing through memory and
interpreting the past. As a result of the thoroughness of his repression and his failure to
experience and engage his past, Quinn remains sealed in an enclosed present without room for
change and lives purely in a timeless realm with no sense of continuity, or even relationship,
between past, present, and future. He instead comes to resemble an automaton, or a still-man,
and the elder and younger Stillmans, along with other figures in the novel, act as reflections of
his psychological state. Quinn’s desire for unity and solution and his complete denial of
ambiguity and contradiction leaves him severed from more of himself and to a world beyond
himself, and therefore his obsessive pursuit leads him along a path to paralysis and eventual
disappearance. The result of his self-denial is that he seeks to lose himself through his delusional
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pursuit of a case which can only remain a case because of his failure to question the path he has
taken.
At stake then, for Quinn, is a more authentic relationship with the world and the
possibility of a future by creatively interacting in the present. His inability to work through the
past under present circumstances and revisit the traumatic effects of his personal losses means
that he cannot re-experience the affects of the past and retranslate past traumas, and this equates
to a failure to bring his imagination into play as a way to recontextualize the past so that he can
move forward with his life. While A. is aware of feeling lost and works through his crises by
writing “The Book of Memory,” Quinn remains lost for lacking this cognizance and not dealing
with his personal losses. He does not open his conception of his identity and pay homage to
others by exploring the depth of his influences. Therefore, his identity remains fragmented and
he desperately seeks integration through a fantasy of empirical totality which leads him into
greater isolation because he remains emotionally sealed from the depths of his past. A. engages
the presence of the past as part of his struggle to understand himself and construct an identity to
continue into the future despite a feeling of disparity within himself, while Quinn represents an
antithesis to A. as an individual who gives up this struggle. The overtly metafictional and
comedic elements that pervade City of Glass perhaps mask and lighten its darker undertones, but
the perplexing uncertainty and protean aspects of the novel reverberate with the unsettling core
questions regarding identity. The ramifications of what can happen to an individual in the face
of destabilizing crises who fails to mourn the past, and therefore denies it, is that he is in danger
of dissociating from himself and subsequently becoming static in the present.
In Moon Palace, Auster presents a character, Marco Fogg, who is not in the midst of
crisis but has worked through the past and is therefore in control of his tale and is able to shape
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the important influences in his life through a chronological account that results in the narrative of
Moon Palace. In contrast to Quinn’s failure to work through his past and his resulting
disappearance due to his delusional pursuits, Marco survives his desire to vanish from life in
response to his troubles. Similarly to Quinn, he begins to empty himself and falls into a state of
extreme isolation. However, because he seeks connection prior to his descent he is rescued from
oblivion by his friends, and this action enables a process of recovery for Marco which nurtures
his ability to move ahead with his life and strive to create into the future.
The drastic instability and disorientation of the interpretive process and its connection
with authoring identity that Auster is concerned with in City of Glass is smoothed out in Moon
Palace through a first-person narrator who details the journey of his personal quest in his youth
from a more stabile perspective as an adult in the present. Moon Palace also incorporates the
theme of disappearance, but as opposed to being a story of descent and the loss of identity like
City of Glass, Fogg details his own narrative from descent to recovery in his journey toward
becoming the author of his own life. Auster’s chief concerns with authoring identity, the
importance of interrogating the past and the inherent instability of this process remain integral
themes, but they are framed within a more traditional form of a picaresque narrative that is less
jarring and demanding of the reader. The narrative voice of Marco Fogg is clear and assured
from the opening page: “I took the job with the old man in the wheelchair. I found out who my
father was. I walked across the desert from Utah to California. That was a long time ago, of
course, but I remember those days well, I remember them as the beginning of my life” (1). Fogg,
as a character who is narrating his story in retrospect, has allowed for and claimed his memories,
the life-shaping events and the emotional content of his past, and so he is able to retranslate and
transcribe his personal affective experiences and subsequently open himself to new experiences.
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Therefore, he remains open to a real future in the sense of being capable of authoring his
existence in the present.
Moon Palace is less representative of the process an interrogation into the past, but is
more prominently concerned with the theme of authorship through Fogg’s personal account of
his travails and the influential figures in his life en route to becoming a storyteller. The novel
therefore represents a shift for Auster into a less self-conscious and more traditional form of
narrative that indicates his development as a writer who is in greater command of his craft. The
central themes from The Invention of Solitude remain, but in the authorial journey from his
memoir to Moon Palace Auster appears to have worked his way through the labyrinth; or he is,
at the very least, more at home inside of it and is able to cover similar themes in a completely
different form.
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Chapter One: Authoring Identity in The Invention of Solitude
“The labyrinth is man. He creates his self-labyrinth as he struggles
to give significance to everything around him. In constant need of recovering
presence, everyman is the labyrinth-maker, killing the monsters of the past,
awaiting future cities.”
-Enrico Garzilli, Circles Without Center
The opening epigraph to Paul Auster’s, “The Book of Memory,” is an intriguing citation
from The Adventures of Pinocchio that sets up a theme of contradiction and differing
interpretations. And perhaps more relevantly, the reference to the weeping dead offers an
intriguing question about the boundary between life and death in regard to the influence of the
dead upon the living through memory’s traces, and so the epigraph also serves as a metaphor for
the living self in life undergoing transformation. The Crow offers a somber and symbolic view
that the dead “are beginning to recover” when they weep while the Owl counters with the plain
declaration, “as far as I’m concerned, I think that when the dead weep, it means they do not want
to die” (73). Their differing views both suggest that the dead are clearly suffering over their
condition, but the question that is begged in the epigraph chosen by Auster is, ‘who is dead?’ Is
Auster the dead man?
The opening page following the epigraph appears to offer this possibility through the
repetition of an open-ended statement: “It was. It will never be again” (75). Auster writes the
“The Book of Memory” (the second section of The Invention of Solitude) entirely in third person,
and he states at the outset, “He decides to refer to himself as A.” (75). The implementation of
third person narration suggests a severance from an authorial “I” that reminisces about a personal
past in order to inscribe his feeling of detachment from the immediate present and to situate
himself within a larger historical scope. The personal stories of A., who represents Auster, are
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placed within the context of, and correspond with, a series of literary and philosophical
references that place the question of identity under the microscope by moving away from a
traditionally formulated memoir that implicitly assumes an “I” at its center. The opening
epigraph and third person narrative create a level of distance such that Auster is presenting an “in
memoriam” about himself, or the person he used to be. Ironically, though, this separation from
himself serves as the road to his recovery and expansion toward new life in a struggle with death
through his desire to continue living. For even though a sharp severance from the past is
inscribed in the assertion that what was can never be again, the only way for Auster to cross the
threshold into a new stage of life distinct from the past is to move through that past and inscribe
it in the form of “The Book of Memory.”
As Auster delves into the chambers of memory, he describes a feeling of absence from
himself: “Christmas Eve, 1979. His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. . . . Even as
he stood in the present, he felt himself to be looking at it from the future. . . . Later, in a time of
greater clarity, he would refer to this sensation as ‘nostalgia for the present’” (76). The absence,
or loss, of a sense of self that Auster elicits is coterminous with a feeling of temporal
disorientation. The feeling of loss in this case is attributable to significant personal losses and
processes of separation which propel Auster on an inner journey into the realm of memory. His
inward turn takes on the character of an archeological descent as though he were excavating
material to be unearthed and arranged as a way to orient himself within the labyrinth of memory,
and therefore, exercise authorship by attempting to represent its associational and circuitous
nature. Auster recalls being lost while wandering through the streets of Amsterdam, and he
connects this solitary state of the past with his present feeling of disorientation which he equates
with a journey through hell:
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He wandered. He walked around in circles. He allowed himself to be
lost. . . . It occurred to him that perhaps he was wandering in the circles
of hell, that the city had been designed as a model of the underworld. . . .
And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was memory, then he realized that
perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. (86)
Auster’s effort to orient himself involves an acceptance and attribution of meaning to his
disorientation by engaging the process of dwelling within himself and exercising authorship
through a representation of his memories on the page as a means of negotiating the labyrinth of
the self. His struggle to achieve this orientation is predicated upon a citation of Pascal that
serves as one of the vital reverberations in the memoir: “all the unhappiness of man stems from
one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room” (76). Auster’s initial citation
of Pascal is repeated throughout “The Book of Memory” like a mantra that serves as a marker of
what he feels he must achieve, and it appears to signify a personal challenge: the task of
confronting himself in his existential state and commencing a quest of self-recovery during a
period of crisis. Auster must confront his disorientation and unhappiness in solitude, and the
necessary journey into memory is posited as a potential site of redemption wherein he can work
toward alleviation from his suffering and restore his sense of self: “for it is only in the darkness
of solitude that the book of memory begins” (164).
In an essay which delves into the subject of mourning in the works of Poe and Melville,
Grace Farrell states, “when one experiences profound grief over the death of a loved one, the loss
can be sufficient to render oneself lost. To lose is to become lost. And mourning is the process
of finding oneself again” (107). While it hardly seems accurate to read Auster’s memoir in terms
of profound grief over the death of his father (the subject of the first section of the memoir,
“Portrait of An Invisible Man”), the period during which he penned his memoir was one of
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personal crisis and extreme transition. His father, was recently deceased, he had separated from
his wife and was therefore partially separated from his son, and his maternal grandfather was
hospitalized and dying. Carsten Springer addresses the importance of the loss of the father
throughout Auster’s subsequent work that is initially addressed in the memoir: “when this person
dies, he not only experiences pain but also evokes memories of the parent in order to understand
their relationship. His ulterior aim is to complete an unfinished step in the search of his own
identity. . . . The attempted identification has always been problematic because the father is
characterized by absence” (85-6). With this is mind, Auster’s mourning could be characterized
as grief over what had been lacking rather than grief over the loss of the individual. While the
father, and his absence, serve as the central subject of the first half of the memoir, and fatherhood
continues to be important throughout the work, Auster’s losses are compounded in “The Book of
Memory.” The father-son relationships are unarguably crucial to Auster’s concerns with
identity, but I wish to focus on the importance of Auster’s struggle to situate himself in the midst
of personal crises through the process of writing. In response to his feeling of absence and
displacement, memory serves as a source of potential for self-recovery and self-creation that
moves beyond the subject of the father as Auster attempts to recover a sense of self-coherence in
textual space.
While Auster’s feeling of absence from himself may certainly reflect the loss of his father
and a heightened awareness of absence as an ironically central theme of that relationship, this is
compounded by the fact that he first reveals his separation from his son in “The Book of
Memory.” Auster is no longer a son to his father, and his presence as a father to his son has been
significantly transformed to include an experience of absence in the midst of his separation from
his wife. His father and son relationships have undergone swift and radical changes, and his
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efforts to come to terms with these changes must occur in solitude so that he can develop
stability within himself even in his barren state and surroundings. The changes Auster
experiences are numerous and extremely life-altering in their disruption of a sense of continuity
and coherence in his identity, and therefore, The Invention of Solitude marks an entry into what
Arnold Modell characterizes as the essential paradox of the self: “the self endures through time
as a sense of identity, yet consciousness of self is always changing” (PS 3).
Amidst his experience of loss and separation, Auster does appear to find some resolution
to the father-son relationships in a realization that carries a revelatory tone: “when the father
dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at his son and sees
himself in the face of the boy” (81). But despite this recognition, Springer suggests that Auster’s
realization is momentary, and so the search for the father proceeds and transforms into a search
beyond, or for what was absent within, their relationship: “‘Portrait of An Invisible Man’ only
represents another phase in the speaker’s search. The search is the text itself” (86). In his highly
reflexive novella, “Ghosts,” the second novel in The New York Trilogy, Auster posits the
question about this process by suggesting the ceaseless, and hence timeless, aspect of the textual
search through a central character who faces the similar fate of an unfamiliar solitary condition:
“How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays
in the room?” (202). In order for the search to continue Auster must go on writing and stay
quietly in his room. Therefore, another integral aspect to Auster’s feeling of absence from
himself, and his previously established roles as a father and a son, is the fact of his complete
separation from a familiar domestic setting and the undeniability of its impact upon his rupture
from specific identifications with the past. The themes of memory, the room, and writing
circumscribe and transcend these personal relationships, and they coalesce as an imaginative
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space that potentially, and yet uncertainly, charts a way through his ruptures and losses.
This imaginative space is signified through the text’s circuitous form which incorporates
both poetic and prosaic textual elements. The circuitous form of “The Book of Memory” is
indicative of a poetic rather than a linear history. Passages are linked through aphorisms and are
concerned with the nature of chance and discontinuity. This aphoristic presentation emphasizes
the theme of a spatialization of time which is discontinuous and porous, and marked by gaps.
This emphasizes the memoir’s poetic form as Auster develops associative links between
historical connections and his personal recollections. This representation of memory, which
could be ascertained as an effort to emphasize the timeless, or the unconscious, aspect of being is
a move away from a strictly prosaic personal story that attempts to link and fill gaps in the form
of a linear narrative. What Auster comes to illustrate is how personal memory and stories can
only take on meaning, or resonate, in the associations that reconnect with the larger world of
story and reality through which they take shape. Auster investigates and details how his personal
experiences resonate with the stories of other individuals he has known in his life, and
ultimately, for the writer, how they resonate with the stories he has read and the larger world of
literature. And Auster’s interrogation of the past, it appears, can only occur in the midst of this
displacement and rupture, alone in a bare room where he must venture into his emptiness and
draw upon the resources of his memory to create and recover himself.
Amidst these crises, Auster lived in a state of flux, staying in both his grandfather’s
empty apartment in Brooklyn and a bare room in an office building in Manhattan. The feeling of
flux and instability in his personal life is therefore mirrored by his transient living conditions,
and it is the bare room that acts as a metaphor for Auster’s spiritual condition that he suggests is
the site from which he must regenerate himself. The location in which he must face himself is
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spartan and offers no solace or respite from his spiritual ordeal. He notes the draining toll of the
effort which lies before him:
There is nothing here to welcome him, no promise of a soma holiday
to woo him into oblivion. These four walls hold only the signs of
his own disquiet, and in order to find some measure of peace in these
surroundings, he must dig more and more deeply into himself. But
the more he digs, the less there will be to go on digging into. This
seems undeniable to him. Sooner or later, he is bound to use himself
up. (78-9, emphasis added)
The struggle is tantamount to burrowing into himself to find strength in the realm of memory,
perhaps in hopes of recovering submerged parts of himself that have been forgotten or untapped,
and which he may suspect as a source for his feeling of self-absence. In regard to what he
portrays as his immanent disappearance, he simultaneously fears the prospect of this looming
unknown and the possibility that he will not have the strength to endure; hence, he may be
unable to locate a self that can find a solution to this unfamiliar disquiet. Additionally, Auster’s
use of third person narration throughout “The Book of Memory” is worth reiterating here as
indicative of representing his sense of displacement.
The spartan conditions of the room in the office building are detailed early in “The Book
of Memory.” He describes the room’s uninhabitability: “people were never supposed to live
here. It is a room meant for machines, cuspidors, and sweat” (77). This uninhabitability
suggests that his living situation is more akin to transience than a state of transition as he
struggles to make his temporary residence livable. His effort is a Sisyphean task:
By staying in this room for long stretches at a time, he can usually
manage to fill it with his thoughts, and this in turn seems to dispel the
dreariness, or at least make him unaware of it. Each time he goes out,
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he takes his thoughts with him, and during his absence the room gradually
empties of his efforts to inhabit it. When he returns, he has to begin the
process all over again, and that takes work, real spiritual work. (77)
The room’s barrenness and lack of association with the slightest hint of comfort evokes an
extreme sense of alienation and dissociation. Additionally, the structure of this section of the
memoir is fragmented and repetitive with an interspersing of particular themes throughout the
text, and the circuitous and non-linear narration represents his disjuncture from the present and
his movement into the space of memory. It is therefore difficult to determine if his inhabitance
of these two locations achieve an overlap in time, or whether they were separate stays that Auster
chose to overlap as a representation of this temporal disjuncture and the labyrinthine nature of
his inward descent while writing the memoir. Auster conveys this confusion and a sense of
vertigo that fills his bare room: “it is as if he were being forced to watch his own disappearance,
as if, by crossing the threshold of this room, he were entering another dimension, taking up
residence inside a black hole” (77).
His inwardness, and yet his paradoxical feeling of displacement from himself, highlight
the importance of the excavation of memories that mark the beginning of his journey. In
addition to the dreariness of his surroundings, the period is marked by the onset of winter, “the
darkest time of year,” wherein the days are so short that “there is no light to sink his teeth into,
no sense of time unfolding. . . . It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness” (78). The
effect of sinking into himself amidst such dreary conditions causes Auster to feel “himself
sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence, as if he were living
somewhere to the side of himself– not really here, but not anywhere else either” (78). In this
instance he portrays a sense of spatial disorientation that reflects his feeling of temporal
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disjunction, and he ultimately determines that he is left with no alternative but to face and plunge
into his personal disorder within this bare environment: “the world has shrunk to the size of this
room for him, and for as long as it takes him to understand it, he must stay where he is. Only
one thing is certain: he cannot be anywhere until he is here. And if he does not manage to find
this place, it would be absurd for him to think of looking for another” (79). Auster is on the
verge of entering a dark and confusing period in which his experience of loss is accentuated by
his bare environment and his lack of stable reference with the external world. His self-diagnosis
is that he must accept this condition rather than resist it. This then becomes the project, or quest,
of the “Book of Memory”: that Auster must dwell within himself no matter how harsh,
estranging, or barren his condition becomes to sustain a hope of locating himself, of attempting
to re-stabilize in the sense of being able to inhabit himself and assuage his feeling of absence.
To state it differently, Stephen Fredman offers the following response to the narrator’s question
in Ghosts, “the only way to get out of the room that is the book is by writing the book” (10).
Auster sets the tone of the memoir as an act of embarking on an inner quest by entering
the realm of memory. As his external world fades away and loses its aura of stability and
certainty in the unfolding of habitual reference, he resigns himself to being propelled internally
and turns his predicament into a quest. And the insistence in his project, through the refrain from
Pascal, is to be able to stay inside the room with himself and inhabit the space of memory. The
characterization of the quest, however, as an entry into another dimension that acknowledges his
crisis of identity and referentiality is one that will evoke questions rather than offer a discovery
of definitive solutions. Fredman characterizes Auster’s work in relation to the poet, Edmond
Jabes, who, he says, “favors a midrashic approach to the book over an idealist one, a text
20
composed of questions rather than answers” (7). The goal that Auster posits is to remain in
solitude and inhabit his memories in order to confront Pascal’s proclamation and face the
indeterminate path of self-questioning as opposed to seeking quick solutions for his feeling of
dis-ease.
Though Auster’s inward quest is propelled by personal catastrophes which remain central
themes throughout the memoir, he moves into a deeper philosophical inquiry. The title suggests
that this inquiry builds into an exploration upon the nature of memory itself and the endless
source of connections and associations that can be mined and brought to light to represent its
depths. His quest then is in the ‘true’ sense of the word in regard to looking into himself in order
to seek and question and perhaps to unveil and flesh out his contradictions. It lies in opposition
to the hero’s quest as there can be no end nor solution in the form of a conquest, because
memory cannot be conquered but only experienced and reconstructed through language. And in
writing through and about memory, there is no tangible object of pursuit to gain nor final
discovery or revelation, but rather a perpetual process of unveiling and inscribing: “memory,
then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. . . He
must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of
memory” (138). If a quest into oneself involves discoveries and a recovery of memories, and so
a recovery of oneself in the present, the losses that propel Auster into himself can never be
overcome. Rather, they must be continually remembered and rearranged inside the book of
memory which can perhaps be endlessly rewritten. Barone states, “Auster understands that
coherence can never remain very long if we are to live” (34). It is as though the only solution is
to discover his solitude in order to evoke memories and arrange them on the page without an
intention to fill the gaps of memory, but rather, to let them resound as pauses and spaces of
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reflection. The gaps must always remain for the space of continuous interpretation to be possible.
The prominence of empty space in Auster’s aphoristic presentation, and the circuitous
repetition of themes that characterize “The Book of Memory” represent and evoke his sense of
disorientation within the realm of memory. Auster’s act of facing his solitude and his feeling of
absence and emptiness turn into a full surrender to, and even an affirmation of, his state in his
recollection of being lost in the streets of Amsterdam:
unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his
steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him nowhere but into
himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from
troubling him, this state of being lost became a source of happiness,
of exhilaration. . . . he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself,
almost triumphantly: I am lost. (87)
This assessment of his condition acts as an affirmation that he must inhabit what feels like the
uninhabitable. To put it a little less dramatically, he must familiarize with the unfamiliar, in the
sense that, as Gaston Bachelard states, “the normal unconscious knows how to make itself at
home everywhere” (10). To be at home everywhere, in familiar relationship with one’s more
disturbing interior realms, is paramount to a creative participation with the everyday rather than
remaining swept up in an unquestioning acceptance of daily life devoid of both sobriety and
imagination. Auster’s ability to sit with himself and the unfamiliarity of his crisis-driven
disorder bring him into contact with personal and literary associations that link his alien state
with others through his imagination. Bachelard remarks on the power of solitude:
he knows instinctively that this place identified with his solitude
is creative. . . . We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats
have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the
labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we
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may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human,
in this case, approaching the immemorial. (10)
His statement implies the primal, the deeply irrational, that presently in the modern labyrinth of
New York where Auster lives. His comment also reinvokes Auster’s fear of using himself up by
journeying beyond the realm of memory and into territory that must ultimately remain
indefinable and mysterious. Bachelard’s words evoke the sense of boundlessness that human
consciousness entails which can never be fully understood nor articulated.
Auster develops a connection to the boundless and immemorial that Bachelard refers to
through a citation of St. Augustine: “the power of memory is prodigious. It is a vast,
immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul.
Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am” (88). Additionally, his
citation of Pascal comes together with his reference to St. Augustine: “memory as a room, as a
body, as a skull that encloses the room in which a body sits. As in the image: ‘a man sat alone in
his room’” (88). In this instance, the man sitting alone can be viewed as a self-portrait of Auster
engaged in the dual act of reading and writing. It is here that the vastness and
incomprehensibility of memory extends through personal memory to literary and historical
associations, as Auster, alone in his room, makes contact with writers from different ages writing
from their spaces of solitude.
Early in the text Auster reflects, “memory: the space in which a thing happens for the
second time” (83). This sense of doubling and paralleling of ideas evoked via the shared space
of solitude is reflected as a central theme of the text via the title, “The Book of Memory,”
through his use of an informal subtitle that is woven into the text’s aphoristic framework. In
“Book One,” Auster depicts his aforementioned dreary living conditions and feeling of absence
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from himself. As I’ve referred to previously, I see this departure reflected in his use of a third
person narrative which also signifies a sense of doubling. “Book Two” of “The Book of
Memory” illustrates the expansion of Auster’s personal plight into the realm of history as it
consists entirely of a lengthy citation from Israel Lichtenstein’s last testament during the
holocaust in which Lichtenstein asks for remembrance for his daughter, his wife, and himself.
The full citation very early in “The Book of Memory” signifies that the text is not a traditional
memoir in regard to being a presentation of a personal testament, but opens into an other space
ordinarily conceived beyond the personal which recontextualizes Auster’s meditations. The
doubling in memory is therefore not a direct mirroring, but rather, indicates that “in the space of
memory, everything is both itself and something else” (136). Therefore, his departure is
simultaneously an entrance into a larger and richer sense of himself that connects with history by
connecting to the solitude of others, and by honoring Lichtenstein’s wish for remembrance.
Even though Auster ruminates, “he remembered that various diagrams of hell had been
used as memory systems,” (86) what he discovers inside his solitary space and private hell of
memory is a connection with others in the shared space of solitude so that a recognition of
otherness is evoked despite his apparent self-enclosure. While moving inside of himself and his
suffering over his losses, he also moves beyond himself as part of an “establishment of
resemblances with other people, other artists. . . .” (Springer 89). In Auster’s words,
what he experienced, perhaps, . . . as he sat alone in his room on Varick
Street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even
alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more
precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak to that solitude, he had
become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the
resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others,
which is to say: history– which one both participates in and is a witness to,
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is a part of and apart from. (138)
Therefore, the initial segments in the writing of “The Book of Memory” detail Auster’s personal
circumstances, and as the text develops he proceeds to frame his existential state within a broader
literary context which resituates his personal narrative. The sense of being alone and not alone
simultaneously addresses Auster’s early sense of absence from himself which he appears to
come to terms with when he succinctly states , “therefore he tells himself, it is possible to be
alone and not alone at the same moment” (136). This doubling also frames the subtitled sections
as parallel texts because the sections are not ordered chronologically, but instead are connected
thematically through the subtitle. In this way, the personal does not disappear, but rather
changes shape within the larger frame of historical forces. It is recontextualized and can be seen
to simultaneously expand as part of this larger framework, and shrink in terms of the self’s
identification with the ego. For Auster, what will never be again is the singularity of the
personal which fails to acknowledge its place within, and alongside, a broader and richer
historical context.
In addition to the “Books” of “The Book of Memory,” another prominent subtitle in the
text is “Installments on the Nature of Chance.” These subsections thematically support each
other as part of the labyrinthine structure of the text and emphasize the lack of a penetrable logic
that characterizes living, and especially the reliving of experiences that occur through the life of
memory and the act of writing. The negation of a chronological representation serves to
illustrate the nature of the mind at work in the present either drifting or jumping through
associations without regard for narrative order or linear coherence. The subtitles symbolize an
attempt to construct order, but it is an order which honors the illusive ‘logic’ of contemplation
and memory in which the past is re-lived in the present, and in this way the passages double as
25
moments of re-experiencing and examining the past, a process which effectively reshapes the
present.
As I have mentioned previously, another significant way in which Auster conveys a
feeling of unfamiliarity and plays with the theme of doubling is via his reference to himself in
the third person to indicate how his personal crises have inflicted a feeling of rupture and
fragmentation of his identity. His implementation of third person narration not only marks this
sense of slippage from himself, but it also connotes an attempt to attain critical distance and exert
control as an author of this experience of rupture, and in this way he is doubled by being both
absent and present. In Auster’s account of his father in “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” he uses a
first person narrative in his portrayal of a man who always remained distant and on the surface in
both his relationships to others and to himself. Auster uncovers previously unknown personal
history about his father’s family which perhaps offers insight into the man’s distance from life.
He discovers that his father, as a child, was present during the murder of his father (Auster’s
paternal grandfather) by his mother. While the unveiling of this dark secret appears to offer
some explanation for his father’s remoteness, it is an explanation that is ultimately too simplistic
for Auster. The traumatic event in the elder Auster’s childhood gives cause for a note of
empathy from Auster toward his father, but the strictly personal tragedy does not let his father
off the hook for being “a perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life” (9). The rejection of a
singular event as central to identity formation lies within Auster’s rejection of writing “The Book
of Memory” as a more limited first person account. This authorial choice serves to create critical
distance and separation from his past. Auster consciously deploys the technique when he states,
“he decides to refer to himself as A.” (75), and thus steers his narrative away from a confining
personal account of events in order to open his memoir to the broader and deeper notion of
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influences which help construct identity. It is a narrative choice that elicits the complex and
highly contextual nature of identity. Unlike his father, he chooses to put his past under the
microscope in the confines of his solitude as an attempt to be present in his past so that he can
explore it and recontextualize it through writing.
In the very first lines of this section Auster writes, “He lays out a piece of blank paper on
the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again” (75).
The shocks of the factual death of his father and the metaphorical death of his marriage are
indisputable, and these deaths leave Auster absent from himself, estranged from the self that he
had been. These opening lines foreground Auster as a writer of the text, and suggest a
significant and dramatic change that he finds himself negotiating. His simple declaration, “It
was. It will never be again,” is repeated only two paragraphs following its first utterance to
emphasize the importance of his recognition of departure from the past. While the reference to
“it” remains incredibly broad and enigmatically open, I would suggest that Auster’s use of thirdperson narrative in relation to himself, and the expansion of his memoir into reflections on the
nature of memory that lead to personal correspondences and literary allusions, are themselves
indicative of the departure to which he refers. The rejection of the event in his father’s childhood
as cause and reason for his detachment from life is embodied in Auster’s leap into a third person
narrative: he strives to objectify his life and see it in this broader and deeper historical context.
“It was. It will never be again” explicitly suggests an intention to depart from a past version of
himself, and from a mode of identification with the world that centered around a stabile, and
hence impenetrable, conscious “I.” The recognition of departure and personal destabilization
coincides with a movement that enters the contradictions and ambiguities of identity and
explores the effects of the stories he has come into personal contact with, as well as literary
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stories and histories encountered via the written word as he tries to come to terms with, and
reconstruct, his identity.
As Auster proceeds along his labyrinthine trip through memory, he also mines the depths
of literary history. This is illustrated through his central reference to Pascal along with several
other citations, including St. Augustine and the epigraph from Collodi’s The Adventures of
Pinocchio. In addition to addressing the sobering subject of death, the epigraph highlights the
contradictory aspect of his inquiry as it signifies the relevance of stories, particularly childhood
tales, and their importance in shaping consciousness. Auster’s decision to use an epigraph from
a children’s tale points to the fabulative nature of childhood and its imaginative coloring, and
therefore points not only to the impossibility of accuracy in recovering one’s earliest memories,
but also to the symbolic importance of the imagination and the fantastic that coalesce with
experience and shape memory. It also directs attention to the essential unresolvability of death
and the outer limits of human understanding, and recalls Bachelard’s primal evocations of the
immemorial.
The journey inward may have been initiated as an attempt to recover himself in the face
of his feeling of disorientation and absence, but the epigraph from Pinocchio signifies the
contradiction and ambiguity of the venture into memory. “It was” can be declared by Auster as
past, but the vagueness of ‘it’ is significant because there is no ontological certainty possible
regarding ‘it,’ whatever it may have been. The elusiveness and clearly subjective nature of
memory does not, however, imply that the work of excavation is not poignant and crucial.
Rather, the recognition of its unresolvability and somewhat fantastic nature serves as a
commentary on the construction involved in human consciousness, and highlights the openness
and endless interpolation that is possible in the face of traumatically tinged events that may be
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unearthed. And because the quest opens with an epigraph which validates contradictory
viewpoints, the question of reality is foregrounded as the stability of his personal identity is
annihilated through the circumstances of loss. Auster’s non-linear and circuitous inquiry, which
is full of ambiguities and contradictions, is presented as being quintessential to stories and to
writing.
Auster’s personal story is embedded within a larger context of narrative histories and
storytelling. For him, the written word, to put experience into language, always implies a
refashioning or reconstruction of experience. To phrase it differently, the act of writing entails
the supplementation of a critical perspective and imaginative coloring of experience, and
therefore recreates it. Auster reconstructs his personal life within a history that recontextualizes
his experience, but the text he leaves behind under his name, does have a deeply personal
signature and style. In this sense, in tune with important themes within “The Book of Memory,”
Auster’s personal memoir might also be said to run parallel with this larger contextual narrative.
The memoir becomes a text that doubles as the narrative is a reflection upon the larger themes of
memory, solitude, and stories as detailed through an array of literary and personal references.
The personal crises involving loss and separation catalyze Auster’s feeling of absence and
separation from himself, and these facts in his life propel him toward an internal excavation into
the spatio-temporal disorder of the unconscious and the space of writing that emerges as a poetic
and labyrinthine meditation, “The Book of Memory.”
The effect of this excavation, this archeological dig into himself, creates a sense of
disorientation as he retreats from the flow of time of the external world, away from social
interaction and everyday concerns, and into darkness, solitude, and the disordered time of the
unconscious where consciousness becomes labyrinthine and hellish. And yet, his descent moves
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him into a space from which he can create. Memory then has a redemptive quality as a place of
sanctuary because it moves Auster well beyond the confines of his immediate condition through
the coupling of personal correspondences with individuals from his past, and with literary
allusions which propel the work more deeply into literary history and tradition. Barone notes,
“the Auster of Solitude centers himself through a historical search. The center revealed by that
search is not solid or uniform but is ever changing” (32). The perpetual motion of his inward
journey enables him to understand and affirm that his solitude is shared with others. For if he
cannot do this, he implies, how can he feel connected to others if he is not connected to himself,
even if this self remains an unstable entity subject to continuous interrogation?
As Fredman commented on the ‘midrashic nature’ of the text, this solitude is not
overcome or resolved, but is a condition of reading and writing that is ongoing, which suggests
that the previous conception of stability and a coherent self that Auster felt absent from, and
which initially plunged him into the work, is instead continually reshaped in the caverns of
solitude such that Auster’s effort to recover and locate himself is fleeting and paradoxical.
Fredman encapsulates Auster’s work; “you could say that his books are allegories about the
impossibly difficult task of writing, in which he investigates the similarly impossible task of
achieving identity– through characters plagued by a double who represents the unknowable self”
(4). For Auster, this doubling and unknowability of the self might perhaps be described as the
revelatory space of memory and writing where the self must perpetually be rewritten. Only
questions and indeterminacy remain, and Auster suggests in his concluding words that it is this
open terrain that must be continually charted: “It was. It will never be again. Remember” (172).
The impossible task of writing to which Fredman refers is, of course, Auster’s imaginative
landscape, and this returns me to Pascal and the importance of sitting quietly in the room. But in
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this instance, the citation changes and suggests a vital reason for inhabiting the creative space of
solitude when Auster quotes Pascal, “it is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not
believing in miracles” (120). Auster knows that his life will never be the same, but perhaps the
miracle is that it will go on changing by writing the text in a solitary space so he can continually
author his existence through the perpetually shifting book of memory.
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Chapter Two
City of Glass: Lost in the Labyrinth
In an interview with Sinda Gregory and Larry McCaffery regarding the autobiographical
aspects of The New York Trilogy, specifically City of Glass, Auster acknowledged a strong
personal motivation behind his exploration of identity in the novel in response to their questions.
He stated, “I think of City of Glass as an homage to Siri, . . . . I tried to imagine what would
have happened to me if I hadn’t met her, and what I came up with was Quinn. Perhaps my life
would have been something like his” (AH 306). Working from this statement, and in
consideration of Auster’s interrogation of his past and the subject of memory in the previous
chapter on “The Book of Memory,” I want to look at City of Glass through a lens that frames
Quinn as a figure of Auster’s alternate self who fails to dwell with himself and investigate his
past through the process of writing following the losses of his wife and son. While The Invention
of Solitude is a meditation upon, and philosophical exploration into, the nature of memory and its
importance in maintaining both a coherent identity and enabling a creative reshaping of identity
through textual representation, City of Glass presents the polar opposite of such an engagement
and details the dissolution of Quinn’s identity due to a repression of memory that leads him to
take on the identity of a detective, Paul Auster, on the basis of a mistaken phone call. In the
novel, Auster imagines what might have happened to himself had he failed to work through his
and cornered himself into an isolated existence to the extent that he would be unable to engage in
social reality and initiate meaningful action in the present because of his alienation from himself
and others.
As I discussed in the first chapter, “The Book of Memory” engages and wrestles with a
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multiplicity of A.’s connections, and the poetic and labyrinthine structure of the text leaves the
work very open for the reader to enter his philosophical speculations that carry the text beyond
an individually centered memoir. The relevance of the openness and expansion of the self that
Auster presents in The Invention of Solitude relates to his recognition of feeling a wealth of
connections while in solitude, and, most significantly, his acknowledgment that these
connections expand beyond the self and link A. with a literary and philosophical tradition. Ilana
Shiloh describes “The Book of Memory” as “a torturous inquiry into his own self” which probes
beyond the self and investigates “the role of memory in the construction of identity” (17). City
of Glass also utilizes a multiplicity of literary connections, but these references serve as a
metatext to illustrate Quinn’s forgetfulness and loss of connection with his past due to his
inability to be in solitude and assimilate personal losses that would require him to dwell within
the fluctuating, nebulous, and painful aspects of his emotional consciousness. Rather than
engage his solitude and explore the correspondences and associations through the act of
remembering as part of his acknowledgment of personal suffering, he remains divorced from his
internal reality and fails to reflect and examine his possible motivations behind his decision to
give up his life and become Paul Auster, the detective.
In a comparison of the two characters from each work, Dennis Barone remarks, “Quinn
empties himself; literally, he thins away to disappearance. On the other hand, A., the narrator of
‘The Book of Memory,’ gradually remembers more and more, and this is how he comes to be
where he is and no place else, and this is how he becomes alive and connected to the world
though alone in a locked room on Varick Street” (34). Auster’s solitary existence following the
loss of his father, separation from his wife and son, and the illness of his grandfather leads him to
descend into the realm of memory and the seemingly endless associations that are engendered.
33
He strives to represent this labyrinthine journey via the written word as a method of sustaining a
connection with the past while retranslating it so that he can continue to live openly toward the
future. Quinn, however, does not descend into his personal labyrinth of hell and experience
feelings of loss and anguish. He fails to deal with his past trauma through the process of writing
(despite being a writer) in order to reshape his understanding of the past and work toward
creating a future that is not programmed. Instead, he denies himself such a recovery process and
suppresses the past, and therefore, he remains lost and oblivious to his inner world. The result is
that Quinn simply effaces himself and does not participate in life personally because he has no
experience to draw upon due to his extensive repression. To highlight a metaphorical aspect of
the novel’s title, City of Glass acts as an inverse mirror to the second half of Auster’s memoir,
“The Book of Memory,” through his presentation of a character that fails to sustain a sense of
coherence within himself: he suppresses his memories and fails to deal with significant losses in
his life. The opening chapter of the novel, in which Quinn decides to be Paul Auster, marks his
passage into a more extreme disconnection from his past and his interior world and propels him
into an enclosed present that results in a palpable feeling of confusion. His repression of
memories becomes inveterate and leads him to forego an internal narrative to the extent that his
disappearance at the novel’s conclusion indicates a complete loss of internal coherence because
of his drive for closure regarding his personal losses. This drive takes form through his
obsessive quest for certainty and transparent meaning in his assumption of the identity of a hardboiled detective.
My aim is twofold: to examine how the inverse mirror that Auster constructs in City of
Glass in relationship to “The Book of Memory” is an exploration into what can happen to an
individual who remains in perpetual forgetfulness of his past; and to explore the ramifications of
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this denial of the past in relation to present experience combined with the possibility of creating a
future through authoring one’s existence. Quinn’s failure to deal with his sense of loss by
repressing his past creates a distorted experience of the present which leaves him incapable of
directing his consciousness and authoring his life into the future because he denies internal
awareness. He therefore lacks a personal basis upon which he can make judgments in the
present. The plot of the novel breaks down and narrative continuity is intruded upon by overtly
metafictional elements which work to represent the dissolution of Quinn’s identity due to this
failure to remain in contact with himself and struggle to sustain coherence and meaning in his
life.
Quinn’s inability to dwell with himself as a means of accessing his emotions and
sustaining an internal narrative is cause for his urgent desire to look for solutions outside of
himself, and this is initially indicated by his appropriation of a passage from The Travels of
Marco Polo as a means to support his belief that he can uncover definitive truth in the world: “to
set things down seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record,
free from any sort of fabrication” (7). Auster presents a character that is so fixated on external
reality and solving problems empirically that his thirst for definitive solutions, as indicated
through his superficial reading of Polo, leads to his breakdown and eventual disappearance
because of his failure to dwell within his memories and engage them as the writer that he was
prior to his losses. His former life as a reader and writer of literary work is evidently buried
along with his memories of his wife and son as he lounges in his room reading sports scores and
clinging to this single passage as part of his need for certainty in the form of a crisp external
reality. The evasion of his internal world and participation in society leads him to delude himself
into believing that everything outside of himself in the physical world is truth for its sheer
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measurability, and so he clings to the phrase from Polo as part of a need for meaning that is clear
and unchanging, and in this way he evades the instability of interpretation and participation with
others. Joseph Daniel Burgard remarks,
in our constant effort to differentiate the ‘I’ from the ‘other,’ to attain
a mastery of ourselves and our environment, we retreat into delusional
moments of lucidity in which both the outer world and the inner self
become bifurcated into easily divisible and manipulated dichotomies.
In these moments, we possess a sense of certainty where there is, in
fact, only uncertainty. (11)
Quinn’s desire for certainty rests on a negation of his inner world and so social reality also
remains foreign to him because he cannot negotiate its ambiguity and openness. He therefore
cannot encounter the unknown with any spontaneity or flexibility. And his desire to unveil truth
empirically in his quest for a transparent reality free from the influence of subjective
interpretation indicates his negation of personal memory as well as subjective thought and
imagination.
Quinn’s obsessive quest for transparency in the external world as well as in language
marks another metaphorical aspect of the novel’s title. But the clear surface of glass also mirrors
and can both reverse and distort the images perceived on or behind its surface. Therefore, while
Quinn doggedly pursues sharply defined solutions through the distant act of observation, what he
winds up encountering is nearer to what Norma Rowen proposes:
All the figures and situations in the case turn out inexorably to be
in various ways his own reflections, and his wide divagations
through the labyrinth of New York only bring him back to the inner
world that he has been so assiduously avoiding. (227)
This single-minded external pursuit occurs because he neglects his inner world, and this
36
subsequently leads him into a hall of mirrors that reflect his intensifying delusional state due to
his failure to come to terms with his personal past because he has sealed himself in his room and
written detective novels in which an alter ego, Max Work, bravely solves every case he
encounters:
He had, of course, long ago stopped thinking of himself as real. . .
If Quinn had allowed himself to vanish, to withdraw into the confines
of a strange and hermetic life, Work continued to live in the world of
others, and the more Quinn seemed to vanish, the more persistent Work’s
presence in that world became. (10)
His repression of memories has led him into an isolated life as a writer of formulaic detective
novels in which Max Work has become “his interior brother, his comrade in solitude” (7) who
decisively and forcefully solves crimes and restores justice to a piece of the world through his
actions. And his adoption of the popular genre enables him to create a heroic character who
serves as an alter ego capable of restoring order to a haphazard and complex world by solving
crimes sheerly through his wits and hard work: “whereas Quinn tended to feel out of place in his
own skin, Work was aggressive, quick-tongued, at home in whatever spot he happened to find
himself in” (10). Through this model Quinn takes a step that further distances him from his
previous life as he essentially attempts to step into the shoes of his alter ego by adopting the role
of detective.
Quinn’s negation of his former literary life and his extreme shift to writing predictablyplotted detective novels is indicative of his intense desire for rationality and logic in the face of
the irrationality of his personal tragedy that upended his previously comprehensible existence.
Patricia Waugh states, “the detective story celebrates human reason: ‘mystery’ is reduced to
flaws in logic; the world is made comprehensible. . . . Michael Holquist has suggested that the
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detective story developed out of a need to escape the obsession with the irrational and the
unconscious” (82-3). Quinn’s adoption of the rationally based detective genre is so
extraordinary, however, that he effectively attempts to obliterate irrationality and the unknown
by severing himself drastically from his previous life. His desire to live anonymously is so
marked that even his personal agent had never met him and only knew him under his
pseudonym, William Wilson.
Quinn’s self-effacement suggests that he has a strictly negative interest in his past
because he negates the process of memory as a result of not wanting to be reminded of the deaths
of his wife and son. Similarly to Auster prior to his father’s death and the break up of his
marriage, Quinn “had published several books of poetry, had written plays, critical essays, and
had worked on a number of long translations” (4). His decision to give up his life in favor of
writing formulaic detective novels serves as the groundwork for his eventual descent in his desire
for a rigid stability that aborts the process of remembering and grieving by denying the years
connected with his family. Rather than deal with his losses through writing as a means to
investigate and recontextualize his past, Quinn encloses himself in a continuous present and only
sustains his existence as a scribe by writing under the pseudonym of William Wilson:
. . . quite abruptly, he had given up all that. 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. Quinn
was no longer that part of him that could write books, and although
in many ways Quinn continued to exist, he no longer existed for anyone
but himself.
He had continued to write because it was the only thing he felt he
could do. Mystery novels seemed a reasonable solution. (5)
38
It is this particular reference in the novel, his pseudonym which refers to the title character of
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “William Wilson,” that signifies Quinn’s loss of connection with
his interior.
While the connotations involved in the reference to William Wilson are layered, the
pivotal reference is metafictional in regard to the self-annihilation of a character due to his
repression of an essential part of himself. In Poe’s story about a double, Wilson leads a
lascivious life and denies the double that represents his conscience. When he murders his
double, the outward manifestation of his conscience that haunts and confronts him, he winds up
murdering himself, and therefore, Wilson’s life of wholeheartedly indulging the pleasure of his
sensations acts as a repression of the memory of his double and a denial of conscious thought.
The death of conscience therefore represents a destruction of his affective experiences which
could then be re-experienced through memory, and Wilson’s denial of affective experience and
his conscience in favor of a life of pure sensation is cause for his inability to sublimate
experience through thought and imagination.
Quinn’s choice to live behind the pseudonym of William Wilson acts as a substitution for
his former identity as opposed to a sustainment of himself through a re-contextualization of his
past experience of personal loss. The symbolism embedded in Poe’s Wilson is not a direct
mirroring of Quinn’s state, however, because Quinn does not live like Wilson nor does he
violently destroy his conscience. However, he does lose touch with his private self, an affective
core, through the repression of his memories and denial of his life by suggesting that a part of
him had died. Wilson symbolizes Quinn’s increasing rupture from himself, and the choice to
shiled himself behind this pseudonym signifies a more gradual case of self-annihilation for
Quinn as it indicates his severance from a part of himself that was connected with other human
39
beings and writing that he cared about. While writing under a pseudonym, Quinn “did not
consider himself to be the author of what he wrote, he did not feel responsible for it in his heart”
(5). In Poe’s story, Wilson willfully attempts to bury the double who represents his conscience
with his evasions until the violent moment of his suicidal act in which he decides to lash out and
kill his conscience. Quinn, however, is unlike Wilson who distinguishes himself as the narrator
of the story and sets himself apart by proposing that “Men usually grow base by degrees. From
me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle” (66). Quinn’s case is not as drastic as
Wilson’s disappearance into a state of oblivious debauchery, but is rather a matter of gradual
deterioration and dissolution of his identity which leads to his disappearance through personal
neglect. His dilemma involves an inability to act as opposed to engaging in an act of willful
oblivion. What is interesting to note here is that Wilson is in control of his own story as narrator
while Quinn, in his anonymity, has absolutely no bearing and control of his story. He doesn’t
actively destroy himself, but instead he passively slips into the identities of William Wilson and
Max Work, and finally, Paul Auster, as a result of his advancing isolation. Additionally, both
Poe’s story and Auster’s novel posit impossible narrators. Wilson tells the tale of his own
bizarre murder-suicide, and City of Glass unveils an unreliable narrator at the novel’s conclusion
which reveals the impossibility of his position as an omniscient narrator and opens the text up to
new meanings and fresh interpretive possibilities.
The narrator’s remark about the pseudonym of Wilson being Quinn’s invention (5) is also
an essential marker of Quinn’s severance from his past, for as someone who had been a literary
writer he would be aware of the famous Poe story. In fact, later in the novel, his knowledge of
Poe is revealed when he follows Stillman Sr. to Riverside Park and recalls that “Poe had spent
many long hours gazing out at the Hudson” (100) from the same location, and he additionally
40
has a superficial recollection of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym in his desperate attempt to find
a distinct pattern and explicit signs in Stillman’s walking routes (85). These instances emerge to
highlight the fragments of Quinn’s memory that surface briefly to the level of consciousness
which he is unable to place in context with his past, and this early reference to Wilson is also
very important as an indicator of what will be revealed as the unreliable narrator of the novel at
its conclusion. The narrator’s claim that William Wilson had been Quinn’s invention, born
within himself and with no association to Poe’s story, betrays the more explicit references to Poe
that Quinn fleetingly recalls later in the narrative. The unreliable narrator serves as yet another
mirror, a further reflection, of Quinn’s psychological state. His severance from the past and from
all literary references as well as connections with others, leaves him without internal reference
points upon which to make judgments, and therefore, he will eventually realize that his singleminded search for empirical solutions and a rational and explainable world outside of himself
will be fruitless. The unreliable narrator represents Quinn’s personal unreliability in making
judgments and reaching decisions because he has cut himself off from an interactive process with
the world that would require an ongoing dialogue with others as well as with himself and his
past.
Unlike Wilson, Quinn’s conscience is not annihilated as he continues living within the
boundaries of the law, but by living an isolated existence only for himself while disconnected
from his past, he foregoes the continued construction of himself by negating participation with
others. If anything, Quinn strives for an impossible ego ideal in his adoption of the identity of
Auster in the effort to protect Stillman Jr. from his father, or as the narrator suggests, “he knew
he could not bring his own son back to life, but at least he could prevent another from dying”
(41). It appears that the repression of the past has perhaps included a repression of feelings of
41
guilt as though Quinn felt responsible for his son’s death. By convincing himself that his
assumption of the case is a noble and heroic act he slips into an identity even further removed
from himself based upon these subterranean motivations. His decision to be Auster, to play a
role he knows nothing about, is part of his drive for certainty and transparency, to find a rational
solution for this absurd case in order to save the son from an abusive father because he could not
save his own. What emerges as his motivation, which could speak to an unconscious
intentionality behind his actions, is the desire to solve, and therefore close, the case of his dead
son whom he rarely remembers and no longer wishes to remember. He has been assuming
alternate identities and has progressively distanced himself from his past in this desire for its
closure. Michael Yarmark remarks, “the single crime Quinn uncovers is the one he committed
against himself: the denial and avoidance of his past, his present, his dreams and ambitions, as
well as of the experiential” (40).
The morning after his decision to play the part of Auster on the phone, Quinn assumes
the identity of the unknown Auster by dressing in a coat and tie, clothing which he had not worn
“since the funerals of his wife and son. He put them on in a kind of trance,” and he is barely
cognizant of his actions as he remarks to himself, “I seem to be going out,” (14) when he leaves
his flat for Stillman’s apartment. Quinn is so removed from his personal past that he has little or
no regard for the present or his future and therefore feels no trepidation or concern about what he
is actually embarking upon, and so he brings no attention, let alone meaning, to his actions. His
failure to think about what he is doing and his complete lack of self-awareness regarding the
extreme aspect of his decision details his unconscious mode of living and lack of personal
concern for his actions. Quinn’s entrance into Stillman’s apartment in the role of Paul Auster
marks his deepening immersion into a trance state: “As he crossed the threshold and entered the
42
apartment, he could feel himself going blank, as if his brain had suddenly shut off” (16). His
entrance into the domicile of Stillman, or ‘still-man’, who has experienced a traumatic rupture
from his past and moves and speaks mechanically due to the violence he suffered at the hands of
his father, suggests that Quinn’s narrowing realm of experience is akin to a state of regression.
The encounter serves as a mirror image of himself in the form of a traumatized man who is
paralyzed to the degree that he resembles an automaton, or “the puppet boy” (26), as Peter
mechanically refers to himself. Stillman Jr. mirrors the state of paralysis and personal
entrapment that Quinn is heading toward, and the encounter with Stillman Jr. marks the onset of
Quinn’s descent into a timeless realm as he completely loses track of time while listening to the
cacophony of repetitive utterances:
The speech was over. How long it lasted Quinn could not say.
For it was only now, after the words had stopped, that he realized
they were sitting in the dark. Apparently, a whole day had gone by.
At some point during Stillman’s monologue the sun had set in the
room, but Quinn had not been aware of it. (27)
Quinn’s severance from himself and immersion into a trance state exhibits the unconscious status
of his life. Arnold Modell notes that “the timeless of the unconscious is the absence of
experience” (OTOR 82). I will have more to say about timelessness, though for now it is worth
stating that his immersion into timelessness is connected with his repression of affects connected
with memory.
The fact that he elects to go on with the case while neglecting to ask fundamental
questions during the meeting indicates the commencement of his disappearance for being unable
to awaken to an internal awareness of how drastic his psychic condition has become in his
decision to adopt the identity of Auster. When he questions Virginia Stillman about her
43
knowledge of the arrival of Peter’s father at Grand Central Station she gives the impression of
being meticulously thorough: “I’ve made it my business to know, Mr. Auster. There’s too much
at stake here for me to leave it to chance” (35). However, when she retrieves a twenty year old
photograph of Peter’s father moments later and says, “I’m afraid it’s the best I can do” (37),
Quinn doesn’t register the discrepancy between her boast and the uselessness of the evidence she
provides him with. He has given up any sense of authority or even responsibility for his choices,
and he commences his journey toward disappearance as he loses his sense of self and seems to
merge with the traumatized mind of Stillman Jr. by entering into his enclosed world devoid of
thought and feeling, and hence any continuity of experience. Enrico Garzilli’s study of the self
opens with a consideration of Miguel de Unamuno’s ideas regarding the relationship of memory
to identity:
Unamuno sees the changing self as involving a continuity which
results from the persistence of memory… Unity results from the person’s
position in space, his action and intentionality. Continuity in time results
from memory. ‘Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as
tradition is the basis of the collective personality of the people.’ Every
change which takes place in the person, then, can only come from the
security that an alteration in thinking or feeling is consistent with the
self’s experience of unity of spirit and of continuity. Otherwise, change,
according to Unamuno, means the pathological obliteration of
personality. (3)
Quinn lacks such continuity due to his persistent repression of memory and negation of
considering personal intentions behind any of his actions in favor of losing himself by wandering
and doing work for which he has no felt connection and performs behind a pseudonym. The
changes Quinn implemented in order to forget his past were the seeds of the destruction of his
44
personality which culminates with his migration into the identity of Paul Auster.
In her consideration of the younger Peter Stillman, Ilana Shiloh states, “he is a synthetic
creature, with no memory and no self” (47), and she continues, “he has a warped sense of reality,
because he has no language, and a warped sense of identity, because he has no memory” (48).
Quinn’s coalescence with Stillman’s state illustrates his deteriorating psychic condition and a
movement toward automation because of his lack of an internal register of the present based on
experiences and memories of the past. Arnold Modell proposes that “The memories of affective
experiences are organized into categories as an attempt to find a perceptual unity between past
and present” (OTOR 66). Quinn’s eventual disappearance is the result of the complete
dissolution of his identity due to his deepening self-alienation because he remains cut off from
internal affects and therefore severs this unity between past and present and is unable to sustain
internal coherence. Modell also states that “Feelings assign value to what is meaningful” (IMB
151), and that “memories can have experiential immediacy only if they are memories of affective
experiences” (OTOR 84). Therefore, Quinn’s judgments in the present are severely distorted
because his repression of the past renders him unable to draw on experience and a personal
language of emotions through memory that could question the strange nature of his meeting with
Stillman and comprehend the severity of traumatic experience that weaves through his
mechanical monologue. While Quinn does still retain a basic linguistic capacity, his lack of
interaction with others and his increasingly automatic writing of stock detective fiction have
reduced this capacity to the extent that he appears to be limited to this representational form of
speech and simply mirrors what others say rather than speak from a personal standpoint.
Following his extended meeting with Stillman, Quinn ventured to a diner where he had
eaten for years and would always talk about the New York Mets with the counterman. This
45
scene details Quinn’s habitual life of anonymity for the fact that he had spoken with the man for
years and yet never learned his name and always conversed solely about the topic of baseball.
The exchange calls attention to his level of personal interaction and also illustrates Quinn’s
shrinking linguistic world as the counterman’s description of Kingman’s home runs, “Boom,
boom” (45), exactly mirrors the words he has just heard during Stillman Jr.’s mechanical speech.
These are the words which emanate from a person completely incapable of expressing himself
due to the violent trauma he suffered at the hands of his father. And a moment later Quinn
himself responds to the counterman with the exact same cliché, “you bet your bottom dollar”
(45), that Peter uttered to him earlier in the day. Rowen states, “the speeches of Peter Jr., victim
and puppet as he is, reflect Quinn’s own estrangement from language” (228). Quinn’s
anonymity and isolation and penning of popular novels that cohere strictly to conventional codes
divorced from life in the present have begot self-forgetfulness and a deteriorating psychological
condition. Arnold Modell states, “the alienation, or decentering, of the self is the psychic
catastrophe” (PS 82), whereas “it is the centering of affects within the self that leads to a sense of
psychic aliveness” (PS 84). And part of this psychic aliveness connects with a centering of
affects through an ongoing internal dialogue. The simple fact of Quinn’s inability to sustain an
internal narrative in the process of giving up his identity as a literary writer and supplanting his
career by writing formulaic mystery novels leads him to float into the role of a detective, an
identity of which he has no conceptual understanding outside of fiction, movies, and magazines:
“like most people, Quinn knew almost nothing about crime” (8). Because he foregoes his selfconception as a writer and does not work through the losses of his wife and son through writing,
or by talking with others, he has given up the process of an ongoing construction of his identity.
Quinn’s lack of an internal narrative and failure to sustain a concept of who he is and has been
46
propels him toward the dissolution of his identity.
Following his meal and cliché-laden conversation with the counterman, Quinn advanced
another step in the direction of playing detective by ignoring these internal tensions through the
repression of his thoughts and feelings. When he succumbs to an urge to purchase a particular
red notebook for the purpose of recording his thoughts and observations about the case he was
“almost embarrassed at the intensity of his feelings” (46). Following this moment, Quinn
picked up his pen and wrote his initials, D.Q. (for Daniel Quinn),
on the first page. It was the first time in more than five years that he
had put his own name in one of his notebooks. He stopped to consider
this fact for a moment but then dismissed it as irrelevant. He turned the
page. For several moments he studied its blankness, wondering if he
was not a bloody fool. (47)
Quinn’s lack of consideration for his intense feelings, his quick dismissal of the relevance of
writing his own name, and his decision not to think about the folly of his endeavor in a moment
when he is close to questioning himself exhibits how far he has drifted as he remains thoroughly
negligent in regard to his own best interest. Instead, he presses on to play the detective and note
details of the twenty-year old photograph of Stillman as part of his obsession for certainty and
closure as he convinces himself that what he is involved in “is not a story, after all. It is a fact,
something happening in the world, and I am supposed to do a job” (47). For Quinn, there exists
a complete separation between the external world which he believes to be purely objective and
factual, and the world of stories and fictions, as though there were no connection between
language, thought, and imagination and living in and perceiving the world. This stringent view
and absolute division of reality indicates how far he has drifted from his previous life as a poet.
Quinn’s act of trying to bring his alter ego to life highlights a further movement from
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himself and any affective experiences of his past. His rationalistic and intellectual notion of the
nature of memory illustrates his disconnect from personal affects and his confused perspective
on memory:
Every once in a while, he would suddenly feel what it had been like
to hold the three-year-old boy in his arms—but that was not exactly
thinking, nor was it even remembering. It was a physical sensation, an
imprint of the past that had been left in his body, and he had no control
over it. (6)
The suggestion in this passage is that memory has no connection with physical sensation, or the
body, and hence, emotion, and also that the experience of memory should actually be under
Quinn’s control. His confused conception of memory exemplifies his repression of affective
experiences of the past, and this can be viewed as a source of his impulsive decision to become
Paul Auster and for his subsequent descent into a state of confusion and despair. And again, this
exhibits the importance of the unreliable narrator as a reflection of the inherent unreliability of
Quinn’s personal judgment due to his denial of his interior world. Through this denial he
represses his inner contradictions and any possible recognition of paradox in favor of insisting
upon a solution that will neatly tie everything together.
It appears that Quinn’s decision to write detective novels emerged out of this denial and
flight from himself through a heavily invested attachment to words that were able to induce a
reassuring effect like those from Marco Polo: “the detective is one who looks, who listens, who
moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull
all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are
interchangeable” (9). We learn that Quinn’s quintessential detective-writer “demands that the
world reveal itself to him,” and that “for five years now, Quinn had been living in the grip of this
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pun” (10). Through his isolated routine of writing stock detective fiction half of the year and
aimlessly wandering the New York streets and attending events by himself over the other half of
the year, Quinn becomes automated to the extent that he doesn’t observe and take in objects in
order to contemplate them, but rather, he passes by them in search of an idea that will magically
unify everything. Therefore, what is implicitly suggested in the pun of the detective and the
writer is that objects themselves contain meaning free of a subjective imagination that creates
meaning by making connections between objects. Yarmark states, “one moves closer toward the
objects of the world in order to take them in and reflect upon them, in order to overcome to some
degree an automatic and unconscious response to existence” (36). Quinn’s essentially romantic
vision in which the detective and writer observe and experience revelations simply through
observation free of self-conscious reflection removes the trouble of conscious labor and thought
and leaves him strictly in a realm of exactly this type of unconscious response. Therefore, with
the ongoing repression and subsequent destruction of memory there is a concurrent destruction to
his imagination and his entire thinking process. Modell states, “thinking is not possible without
imagination” (IMB 108), and as a way to consider Quinn’s lack of imagination and deteriorating
psychic condition, he notes, “imagination can be constricted by trauma or expanded through
empathy and aesthetic experience” (IMB 111).
I have noted continuously that Quinn’s severance from affect is due to his disconnection
from the past and this connects with a lack of capacity for empathy which keeps him locked
inside the role of detective. In regard to aesthetic experience, the automatism of his writing
leaves him devoid of such experience in relation to his work, and this is doubly emphasized in
his insistence upon a purely factual and objective vision of reality through which his subjective
experience is denied. Again, Modell notes, “although one’s imagination is autonomous, it can
49
also be directed to a degree that excludes the agency of the self, as in cases of trauma, where
feelings and thoughts are stereotypic and constricted in ways analogous to a fixed-action pattern”
(IMB 111). The repression of the trauma of his losses over an extended period of time has led
Quinn down an increasingly narrow path in which his shriveling personal agency is mirrored by
the mechanistic movements and language of Stillman.
When Quinn does have moments of recall he either forgets them immediately or
dismisses them offhand as unimportant because he wishes to attain closure from the losses of his
wife and son and from the person he was before they died. When he first meets Stillman Jr. we
discover that “uncannily, in that first moment, Quinn thought of his own dead son. Then, just as
suddenly as the thought had appeared, it vanished” (17). He has reached a state of nearly
automatic repression of his memories and by doing so he corners himself into a sterile lifestyle
wherein he becomes a caricature of a human being by adopting the character role of a detective
whose explicit purpose, in his mind, is to solve cases empirically through detached observation.
Since Quinn does not want to be reminded of his past, he is unable to construct anything for
himself because he empties himself so thoroughly that he lacks an internal register from which to
act and construct a future, and this leaves him vulnerable to following both Stillmans
respectively into stasis. Gaston Bachelard states, “any weakness in the function of unreality, will
hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee” (xxxiv). While
Quinn’s entire life has become muddled and unreal, he has no awareness of this, and his
insistence upon finding transparency and certainty on the surface of the world indicates his desire
for a simplistic outlook that is closed to his inner world and an acknowledgment of his subjective
coloring of reality. His sense that his life was no longer real and that he existed purely through
the figure of his detective hero, Max Work, places Quinn’s obsession with empiricism and
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rational inquiry in an absurd position because it is purely a romanticized empirical outlook.
George Grella notes that “the private detective, born as a plausible substitute for the conventional
sleuths of the whodunit. . . evolved into a literary hero, nearer to his archetype’s imaginative
reality than to an actual detective” (118). Quinn’s fascination with detective fiction and his
interest in Polo’s travels are part of a naïve and romantic outlook designed to avoid the painful
and rigorous process of dealing with his past and accepting the power of the irrational, the tragic
losses of his wife and son.
Quinn cannot propel himself into a future and construct a new narrative because he does
not grieve for his losses, and his flight acts as a diversion and defense to prevent him from
feeling the pain of his past. Modell offers that “the manic defense creates the illusion of the
everlasting present in that the experience of present time is not recontextualized with the past”
(OTOR 80-1). And his further elaboration upon this subject describes Quinn’s condition
perfectly; “painful memories, especially the memory of loss, are denied; it is as if the individual
is effectively cut off from memories of the past and concerns about the future. He is in a world
of the everlasting present” (OTOR 80). Quinn’s escape into external reality as part of his
insistence upon discovering a rational solution while under the sway of the pun of the detective
ironically renders him stuck in timelessness as he is unable to construct a personal narrative or
any sort of autobiographical self that connects his present phase of life to his past. This
automatism, which results from Quinn’s continued repression of his interior world, additionally
signifies that he has lost the capacity to generate meaning from within himself. And Modell
connects this with the sense of alienation of the self: “the inability to generate meaning is a
psychic catastrophe” (PS 144). Therefore the ability to generate meaning is intimately tied to
one’s relationship with memory as vital to the ongoing construction of an autobiographical self
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in order to strive to sustain personal continuity and create a concept of oneself through time.
Modell also emphasizes that “the construction of meaning requires the use of emotions and
feelings as markers of value” (IMB xiii). Or, as Miguel de Unamuno states plainly, “Man is said
to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling
animal” (3). Quinn’s suppression of his feelings, and therefore his negation of translating
affective experiences as a means to conceive of and shape his identity, causes him to live
suspended in a timeless realm, a continuous present, because he lacks such markers of value.
His rigid determination to tie everything together with a rational solution blocks him from a
process of reconstructing and understanding his place in the present or how his present
perceptions have been influenced by experience.
The sense of immersion into a state of timelessness is nothing new to Quinn, but it has
reached a pronounced state in his accelerated flight from himself as Paul Auster. In his state of
oblivion to the life he once led, the passage that characterizes Quinn’s self-forgetfulness and his
isolation through extended periods of timeless drift relates to his pleasure of wandering the city
streets:
More than anything else, however, what he liked to do was walk. . .
he would leave his apartment to walk through the city---never
really going anywhere, but simply going wherever his legs happened
to take him.
New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps,
and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know
its neighborhood and streets, it always left him with the feeling of
being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well.
That Quinn’s most pleasurable activity was to lose himself in the streets of New York for
52
roughly half of the year paints a portrait of a man who has lost touch with his inner life and any
dreams, hopes, and ambitions, as well as simply thinking about where he had been in order to
think about his present state and consider possibilities for a future. Yarmark states, “in flight
from the pain of his past, Quinn’s rambles are an excuse for physical motion that mirrors
Quinn’s own internal instability” (50). There is no indication that his idle time spent wandering
is balanced by a reflective state of consciousness, but rather that he engages in these excursions
strictly for the purpose of losing himself in the flow of the crowd in order to feel himself as part
of the sea of humanity as a means to escape himself. These ventures are not characterized by
acts of seeking out others because that would require spontaneous interaction in which he would
have to reflect on his actions and potentially confront himself.
His inability to confront himself in solitude and his preference to remain on the surface of
life is mirrored by his failure to confront other human beings in any public forum outside of his
routines. Instead, he sustains a life of extreme isolation and is content to remain in comfortable
anonymity and seclusion. Barone’s commentary on Auster’s depiction of his father in The
Invention of Solitude is appropriate for Quinn:
The point is: his life was not centered around the place where he lived.
His house was just one of many stopping places in a restless, unmoored
existence, and this lack of center had the effect of turning him into a
perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life. You never had the feeling
he could be located. (9)
By divorcing himself from his past and denying his memories, his repression is so entrenched
that he is unable to experience the present in relation to past experience and be open to the
uncertainty and ambiguity of human interaction where he must rely on personal judgment to
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make distinctions. And to reiterate, his lack of personal experience with crime in any fashion
emphasizes that he experiences the present solely through the distorted lens of fictional
representations of detectives and crime. But this basic fact is readily suppressed by Quinn so
that he can live in a fantasy in which he becomes his alter ego, Max Work, out of his desperate
need for decisive resolution. Madeleine Sorapure emphasizes the link of his activity to lose
himself as marking an identity crisis in his perpetual desire “to imagine and assume alternative
identities” (76), and she takes note of Quinn’s contradiction with the literary genre in which he is
so absorbed: “this is, of course, highly incongruous with the behavior of the traditional detective,
whose persona is a generally consistent one” (76). Quinn’s denial of his internal world is the
source of his inability to comprehend contradiction and paradox, and it is the reason that he
plunges ahead into a state of dissolution. Sorapure continues, “the mystery is, in this sense, in
Quinn himself, in his ‘lost’ self, or rather, in his efforts not to find himself, to keep his thoughts
only on the surface of himself and his world” (76). Because Quinn does not attend to his inner
world, he does not read his surroundings. He therefore remains stuck because he cannot admit to
his uncertainty nor acknowledge his contradictions and move from that awareness to
spontaneously interact with others and engage in a process of exploration in an effort to bring
meaning to his life.
Quinn’s continual misreading is concomitant with his inability to allow for ambiguity and
reach decisions through a process of interpretation because of his urgent desire for a singular
reading, for definitive clues which he expects to provide him with answers and closure. His
activity of walking the streets in New York marks his desire to give up the process of interaction
and the need to encounter others, and therefore himself, so that he can evade reflection and
thought:
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He was able to escape the obligation to think and this, more than
anything else brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness
within. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in
front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own
body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no
longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel
that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things:
to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around
himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving
it again. (4)
His escape from the obligation to think thus serves as a complete eschewing of judgment and a
desire to live in a world without distinction. This expresses his fear of difference and failure to
engage with the subtleties of interaction as his desire for clarity renders him unable to break free
of his habits and participate with any sort of intimacy or with commitment outside of himself
because he “no longer existed for anyone but himself” (10). Instead, Quinn loses himself in the
stream of consciousness and develops a sense of separation from his environment purely through
physical activity free of an ongoing internal narrative in relation to what he sees or encounters.
Yarmark suggests, “Quinn’s ‘nowhere’ insulates him from the world, from self-reflection, and
precludes an awareness of nothingness, of non-being” (50). Whereas ‘A.’ was lost in the
labyrinth of himself and his memories, he did not inhibit the process, but strove to detail,
interpret, and represent his internal circumlocutions and his relationship with nothingness
literally and metaphorically by facing the blank page of writing and creating a text that emerged
from a sense of personal urgency.
I will momentarily return to the metaphor of the blank page, but I first want to expand
upon Quinn’s loss of linguistic capacity in connection with his ‘case’ and his excursions through
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the streets of New York. Rowen comments on his connection with the Stillmans: “their reliance
on cliché and their contrived and mechanical delivery express in extreme form Quinn’s sense,
underlying all his fluency, that the language he is using is not his own” (228). Quinn moves
outside of himself and wanders in order to be free of an experience of the present that connects
with the past so that he doesn’t have to engage and ‘read’ either his past or present experiences,
let alone consider an interrogation of his past through writing. To recall Auster’s words from
The Invention of Solitude, he states, “If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he
must be thinking not of himself but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there.
And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one’s life so that
nothing is ever lost” (138). Unlike A., Quinn does not engage with and interrogate his past
through writing as a means to come to terms with his history, but instead he gives up his life as a
poet and essayist and moves toward disappearance as a consequence of divesting himself of any
self-examination through an inquiry into his past. And as I’ve indicated previously, Quinn fails
to pause and contemplate what he sees or experiences because he expects objects to reveal
themselves directly to him free from conscious thought and subjective coloring. He does not
forget himself temporarily and then reflect upon events because he has lost all sense of
continuity in his identity due to his extensive repression of memory and their affects, and as a
result he has become incapable of measured thought and judgment based upon an engagement
with his own experiences.
Auster’s paradoxical statement about the nature of memory calls forth his utilization of
A. as the central character of “The Book of Memory”; a topic upon which Dennis Barone
comments. Barone examines how Auster lays open the inherent irony of identity as he “presents
to us a person connected to the world through memory in a third-person narration” (33). He
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notes, “how odd that as the self becomes more centered, that self speaks of itself as other” (32).
Whereas Auster explores the elusiveness of memory in the third person to strive for a sense of
separation from himself, Quinn is so locked into his immediate present that he remains lost to
himself and incapable of engaging ambiguous and contradictory aspects of reality. Modell
remarks that the acceptance of paradox “results in a mind set that enables one to tolerate
inconsistency and contradiction without forcing a premature closure” (PS 3). Quinn’s desire to
lose himself and seek closure in the form of a utopia is a result of his inability to inhabit himself
and accept his contradictions and the paradoxical nature of the self. Burgard proposes that the
efforts of the individual to stabilize identity involves a process of trying to “reduce troubling
contradictions of the inner self” (6), but that identity can never be stabilized because of “the
complications inherent in the interpretive process which prevent us from doing so” (4). The
inherent instability of identity is precisely what Auster depicts in the fragmented and labyrinthine
structure of The Invention of Solitude where he expresses the dual feeling of being
simultaneously present and absent to himself: “even though there is only one man in the room,
there are two. A. imagines himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and
not there” (136). And Auster’s use of third person narration expresses this inherent contradiction
of absence and presence which serves as a vehicle for him to flesh out his inner tensions and the
contradictory impulses in the present which he ironically characterizes as “nostalgia for the
present” (76). It is these inner tensions and contradictions that Quinn is completely oblivious to
and so he is unable to sit with himself and become aware of the unstable and contradictory nature
of identity that presses for an ongoing play of interpretation. Burgard draws together the idea of
interpretation with self-agency: “Interpretation... reveals aspects of the self as agent and creates
the self as a consequence... we selectively make the ‘other’ an aspect of ourselves” (5). This
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selective action consists of an embedded reciprocal effect, not only of one’s actions in direct
response to an encounter, but also through a subsequent internal narration which can effect
further actions through a feedback loop. Identity as agent is constantly shifting with encounter as
an interactive process requires an encounter within oneself as well. One’s identity must
therefore be unstable if it is to remain flexible and open to encountering others, but the flux of
identity can be stabilized with an internal awareness of personal encounters through a narrative
process that is open to interpreting experience while accepting the play of uncertainty rather than
imposing a fixed meaning. Or, apropos to Quinn, his identity is unstable and crumbling because
he has become inflexible and closed off due to his search for totality, for a solution that will tie
everything together. Burgard notes, “a stable identity enhances one’s ability to interact with a
varying reality, allowing one to become the referent from which reality gains its meaning and
coherence” (3). But how does this stabile identity come into being? For a response to this
question, Auster points to the importance of narrative in his reference to Oliver Sacks: “every
whole person, he says, every person with a coherent identity, is in effect narrating the story of his
life to himself at every moment” (AH 308). This is precisely what Quinn does not do because he
prefers to lose himself and escape such a process.
Quinn’s anonymity and seclusion goes hand-in-hand with his desire for closure and is
cause for his extreme isolation and his failure to engage with others inter-subjectively. His
severance from relations with others, both in the present and the past, leaves him unable to
encounter and engage with others openly and closes him off from the possibility of creating a
future. Modell cites Mikhail Bakhtin to emphasize that inter-subjectivity is the only possibility
of existence in the world:
Cutting oneself off, isolating oneself, closing oneself off, those are
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the basic reasons for loss of self. . . It turns out that every internal experience
occurs on the border, it comes across another, and this essence resides in this
intense encounter. . . To be means to communicate (to be in the process of
becoming). . . To be means to be for the other, and through him, for oneself.
Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary;
looking within himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes
of the other. . . I cannot do without the other; I cannot become myself
without the other; I must find myself in the other, finding the other in me
(in mutual reflection and perception). (PS 87…)
The importance of the other and inter-subjective experience in no way negates the importance of
reflection and dwelling with the self in solitude, but rather points to Auster’s statement in “The
Book of Memory” of being alone and not alone at the same time; of coming to feel one’s
connections in solitude so that when one is most intensely alone he feels his connections to
others. Modell comments that “we are confronted with the paradox that although the coherence
of the self can be sustained from within through the generation of passionate interests and moral
commitments, the private self requires the presence of another” (PS 121). He proposes that this
paradox is based on the fact that the initial experiences of solitude require the presence of the
mother, but that “later, as adults, we are sustained in states of solitude by subjectively created
(maternal) presences” (PS 121-22), and he goes on to suggest that “loneliness can be defined as a
failed state of solitude” (PS 123).
Quinn’s inability to be with his thoughts and memories in solitude, and his need for
continuous motion through the streets of New York free of any interpersonal exchanges all point
to a state of loneliness which he cannot acknowledge because of his severance from affective
experience that leads to a distortion of his perception so that he has completely lost his sense of
identity. He has been unable to allow for his personal solitude and create such a presence by
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feeling connections with others, and his venture into the ‘Stillman case’ illustrates the deleterious
effects of his prolonged self-enclosure because of the absurdity of his decision, and especially
because of his stubborn persistence to remain on a path which eventually results in
homelessness. He finally upsets his routine of writing and wandering, but he clings to a
simplistic objective outlook through which he perceives a world modeled on the representations
of detective fiction, and he therefore remains isolated from himself and the world at large.
In examining the subject of this enclosure through the trope of the locked room, an
important symbol throughout The New York Trilogy, Ilana Shiloh states, “the locked room is not
just one of the conventions of detective fiction. It is a metaphor for the genre itself, for its closed
world, in which the chaotic, mysterious aspects of existence can always be explained away by
reason” (37). When Quinn adopts the identity of Auster he is abruptly removed from this safe
enclosure and cast forth into the uncertain and ambiguous terrain of social reality which requires
an awareness of, and interaction with, others that depends upon a continuous process of
interpretation. His safely sealed existence, which had turned him into an automaton due to its
structured regularity free of interaction with others, is upset and exposed when he takes on the
identity of Auster to venture out of his room and play the part of detective. Patricia Waugh
proclaims that, “in the post-modern period, the detective plot is being used to express not order
but the irrationality of both the surface of the world and its deep structures” (82-3). This is
precisely what Auster proceeds to unveil through the absurdity of Quinn’s adoption of the case
and his manic drive for certainty and definitive solutions. His decision to pretend to be Auster
could be viewed as a desire for adventure to escape his dreary habitual existence, but within the
novel’s hall of mirrors, the abruptness of his act can be interpreted as the surfacing of his
unconscious as his venture from his strict routine leads him into reflections of himself and
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continual encounters with flashes from his past. These memory flashes arise with greater
frequency as the novel proceeds, but Quinn quickly represses these moments or he fits them into
his imaginary case rather than allow them to give him pause and interrupt his pursuit of Stillman.
The important aspect of these encounters and their effects resides in Quinn’s complete lack of
awareness of what is happening to him, though he does finally acknowledge his personal
confusion when he decides to seek out Auster. It is through his encounter with Auster, the
character, who metafictionally looms as the authorial figure ultimately responsible for his
confused descent, that he is forced to confront his losses and the denial of his former life. When
Auster’s family enters the scene and Quinn is introduced to Auster’s wife, he is finally
confronted with feelings of loss that he had been suppressing for years:
In that one brief moment he knew that he was in trouble. She was a
tall, thin blonde, radiantly beautiful, with an energy and happiness that
seemed to make everything around her invisible. It was too much for
Quinn. He felt as though Auster were taunting him with the things he
had lost, and he responded with envy and rage, with a self-lacerating pity.
Yes, he too would have liked to have this wife and this child, to sit
around all day spouting drivel about old books, to be surrounded by
yoyos and ham omelettes and fountain pens. He prayed to himself for
deliverance. (121)
The shock of this encounter causes Quinn to hastily leave the apartment, and his prayer for
deliverance indicates his realization that he has fallen into an abyss as the narrator states, “Quinn
was nowhere now. He had nothing, he knew nothing, he knew that he knew nothing” (124).
Though Quinn was really nowhere from the outset of the novel (a reality that he
adamantly avoided) due to his suppression of his past and the unreliability of his judgment, as
reflected through the sympathetic narrator, he becomes aware of his emptiness when Auster (the
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writer) surreptitiously confronts him with his evasions. The novel’s metafictional elements reach
their peak as Quinn’s status as a parodic character is unveiled after Auster divulges his wild
theories on Don Quixote: “Auster leaned back on the sofa, smiled with a certain pleasure, and lit
a cigarette. The man was obviously enjoying himself, but the precise nature of that pleasure
eluded Quinn” (120). Through this encounter with Auster, metafictionality is explicitly
foregrounded and the reader is humorously brought to a heightened awareness that Quinn is a
character at the mercy of the writer of a fictional text. But he is illustrative of a character, as
Auster’s alternate self, that travels into an abyss because of his lack of engagement with life
through an extensive repression of his past that negates the intensity of his feelings and an
acknowledgement of the emptiness he must accept in lieu of his losses.
His flight from himself and any feelings of emptiness by automatically churning out
predictably plotted novels and ceaselessly walking the streets without direction or plan is akin to
William Wilson’s denial of conscience as an annihilation of the need to think and make
judgments based in affective experience. And his automatic routines have the effect of leveling
the world into an indistinct plane and act as a reinforcement to repress the past so that he can
avoid thinking about the person he was in comparison with his present state. By virtue of this
prolonged activity, year after year, Quinn’s adoption of the role of detective, of which he has no
personal experience, is an understandable act based upon the self-alienating course of his life.
Quinn has gone without meaningful contact with others for such an extended period of time that
even though his fantastic foray into the detective world forces him into new situations and
encounters, he is unprepared for these encounters and reads everything poorly because he only
reacts through a naïve and distorted understanding of detective work based solely on
representative fictions. His inner self has withered and his adoption of the identity of Auster to
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save Stillman can be seen as a heroically desperate act in an effort to revive this self, an affective
core, which had once lived for and through others. However, it is a foolishly misplaced attempt
at personal recovery because his severance from a personal past and his isolation lead him to
embark upon an imaginary case which will eventually strip him of his personal delusions.
It is clear that Quinn is hardly processing or narrating what is happening within himself
once he decides to take on the identity of Auster. Quinn’s automatism in writing and lack of
interest in his work has caught up with him by virtue of the fact that he has worked solely to earn
a living for himself in order to continue his isolated existence. As opposed to working toward
internal coherence by remaining in contact with his personal life and acknowledging the
importance of his past, his losses, and his connections with people and work as a means of
sustaining coherence in the present, he proceeds on a path of self deception by remaining lost in
his quest for an empirical resolution. His choice to live by the pun of the detective, of “reducing
himself to a seeing eye” (4), who attempts to experience life through an objective lens indicates
his inability to engage with the instability of interpretation and therefore make judgments on his
own and shape his reality through a process of interaction with others. His continual misreadings
result from his inability to gauge life based on a constancy of feeling which would enable him to
think about his predicament as a man working under a pseudonym and adopting the identity of
Paul Auster simply because he receives an urgent phone call making such a request.
His sudden urgency to lose himself at a further remove by attempting to act the part of
detective is a consequence of his self-deception by remaining cut off from an interior world of
thought and feeling, and this complete severance from his personal interior leaves him with what
Anthony Storr refers to as a ‘false self.’ He characterizes the false self as “a self which is based
upon compliance with the wishes of others, rather than being based upon the individual’s own
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true feelings and instinctive needs. . . . he is merely adapting to the world rather than
experiencing it as a place in which his subjective needs can find fulfillment” (20-1). The path
upon which Quinn journeys through his assumption of the identity of Paul Auster leads him to
unknowingly encounter projections of his deteriorating psychic state in the form of the younger
and elder Stillmans, and this is illustrated through his literal adaption to both men. As I
mentioned earlier, he enters a trance state and completely loses track of time while taking in
Peter Jr.’s incoherent speech, and he also adapts to Peter Sr.’s slow movements when he not only
tails him through the streets, but falls into his exact gait:
he became aware of the fact that he was no longer following Stillman.
It felt as though he had lost half of himself. For two weeks he had
been tied by an invisible thread to the old man. Whatever Stillman
had done, he had done; wherever Stillman had gone, he had gone.
His body was not accustomed to this new freedom, and for the first
few blocks he walked at the old shuffling pace. The spell was over,
and yet his body did not know it. (110)
The result of solely looking outside of himself leaves him open to all influences because he has
lost the capacity to judge and evaluate information through a process of self-reflection. In order
for Quinn to once again seek and find fulfillment he would have to give up his fantasy of closure
and allow for the painful memories of his losses to surface as a means of processing and
incorporating his experiences through self-reflection in order to learn and engage the present
more consciously. His denial of this process prevents him from acknowledging his needs and
working toward fulfillment in the present and a future open to new possibilities. Therefore,
Quinn continues living unconsciously, in denial of his personal emptiness, because of his failure
to assimilate his experiences and come to terms with the uncertainty and unpredictability of life.
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To recall, Quinn’s failure to face the blank page is exemplified when he ignores a
suspended moment of doubt after entering his name in the red notebook. His decision to press
on following his hesitation before the blank page alludes to a key metaphor in “The Book of
Memory” regarding Auster’s concerns with memory and the process of writing in the
reconstruction of identity. The blank page serves as a metaphor for facing and encountering
emptiness in solitude through which Auster shapes his text, and subsequently, his identity. In
response to a question about City of Glass, Auster stated, “the whole process that Quinn
undergoes in that book . . . is one of stripping away to some barer condition in which we have to
face up to who we are. Or who we aren’t. It finally comes to the same thing” (AH 262). In The
Invention of Solitude, Auster works through the process of finding himself as a literary writer,
and he expresses his own encounter with this barer state metaphorically as the blank page, and
also directly when he states, “in my bravest moments, meaninglessness is the first principle”
(147). Quinn cannot dwell in solitude and face the empty space of the blank page where he
would have to confront his past and create out of that dwelling. He eventually discovers who he
is not when he finally must acknowledge his folly and the descent he has undergone in
pretending to be a detective. His resistance to the reality of his personal condition finally cracks
open, and when he takes to wandering the streets again and sees his reflection in a mirror of a
window shop he accepts his state of transformation with equanimity:
It was not that he had been afraid to confront his image. Quite
simply, it had not occurred to him. He had been too busy with his job
to think about himself, and it was as though the question of his
appearance had ceased to exist. Now, as he looked at himself in the
shop mirror, he was neither shocked nor disappointed. He had no
feeling about it at all, for the fact was that he did not recognize the
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person he saw there as himself. . . He had turned into a bum. . . He
looked at this new Quinn and shrugged. It did not really matter. He
had been one thing before, and now he was another. It was neither
better nor worse. It was different and that was all. (142-3)
Of course, Quinn’s reaction fits into his long-standing state of a lack of concern for himself
which led him to this condition, but for the first time he is forced to confront himself and cannot
deny what he sees, and he therefore is left with no choice but to deal with himself honestly.
Quinn resists the bareness and emptiness for as long as he can, but his impulse for
adventure sets him on a parodic quest in which he is stripped of his illusions of finding absolute
security and certainty in the world. The severity of his dissociation from his interior leads to
complete self-forgetfulness, and his disappearance symbolizes that the distorted layers of
construction through which he perceived the world have been stripped away. His self-negation
and his insistence upon finding meaning and answers free from a process of self-questioning is a
violent denial of emptiness which is conveyed at the outset of the novel through Quinn’s
inability to remember his dreams: “in his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself alone in
a room, firing a pistol into a bare white wall” (10). Through his denial of the ambiguity of his
inner world and the intense emotions connected with his losses, he seeks to fill every gap and
block any potential feeling of emptiness. The blank page requires stillness, but Quinn’s
incessant need for motion serves as a method, as Sorapure says, “not to find himself” (76).
Instead, he desperately needs meaning to be revealed in every detail, and his dread of emptiness
is what causes him to ignore the moment of suspension in which he questions himself. His
disappearance at the conclusion of the novel symbolizes that he has entered this barer state, but
whether he can discover and work toward creating who he is remains unresolved. His decision
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to press on with the role of Auster following a poignant moment of doubt indicates his
unwillingness and lack of capacity to give life to a language that emerges from a personal
process, and therefore his potential for recovery is questionable. While his descent strips him of
his denials and leads him into pure darkness where perhaps, like A., a recovery can eventually
result through a process of dwelling within himself, Auster leaves Quinn’s fate unresolved to
reflect the open-ended nature of the construction of identity. Auster explores the ongoing
question of identity and its relationship to memory and narrative through Quinn, and he suggests
that the difficult process of coming to terms with who we are or are not can only be discovered
and defined individually by encountering our personal illusions and false constructions in a barer
state that can only be reached in the darkness of solitude.
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Chapter Three: Postscript—The Formation of the Storyteller in Moon Palace
Auster’s struggle through his personal crises in The Invention of Solitude was linked with
the writing process in his effort to explore his identity and situate himself through a
philosophical meditation on the nature of memory. I have posited, through Auster’s personal
statements, that his first novel, City of Glass, is a continuation of this exploration through the
creation of a character, Quinn, who fails to inhabit himself and work through the past. This
failure leads to Quinn’s disappearance which represents his self-negation through a complete
denial of his tragic experiences of loss that renders him incapable of living with his past in the
present and blocked from the possibility of imagining and working toward a possible future. His
disappearance represents his complete absorption into a timeless realm as his dissociation from
himself is so pronounced that he completely loses access to his personal experience and a sense
of continuity between past, present, and future. In Moon Palace, written several years after City
of Glass, Auster’s exploration takes on a more cohesive and traditional form as the protagonist,
Marco Fogg, recounts the story of his past as an adult, and has therefore managed to work
through his personal struggles and losses and established a sense of coherence in his identity
through authoring his tale.
Like The Invention of Solitude (IS) and City of Glass (CG), the themes of identity and
authorship remain central as Fogg must face the loss of his last known relative, experience his
own urge to vanish from the world, and then subsequently struggle to rebuild his life and call on
his resources in an attempt to author his existence and create meaning in his life. A significant
narrative distinction in Moon Palace, however, is that Fogg tells the story of his past adventures
and struggles in retrospect through a first-person narrative. This distinction is very important as
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it denotes a time gap between the events of the past and the voice of the narrator in the present
which indicates that Fogg already holds a position of authorship through his account of what he
deems to be the life-shaping events of his past. Unlike IS and CG, Auster’s main character and
narrator is not in the midst of crisis and working through, or denying, his past, but rather, Fogg
has already attained critical distance and is in command of his story.
The themes of loss, emptiness, and the search for a stabile identity are all present in the
novel, but the narrator’s control of his story in the present is characterized by a chronological
account of poignant personal events which indicates that he has attained a sense of coherence
and continuity in his identity. This sense of control and continuity foregrounds the topic of
authoring as the central theme of the novel as Fogg depicts the strong influence of his Uncle
Victor’s encouragement for him to become “the author of his own life” (7) in the opening
segment of his tale. Additionally, another prominent and influential figure in Fogg’s story is the
“sphinxlike” (99) Thomas Effing, the man that turns out to be his grandfather, who indoctrinates
Fogg into the realm of storytelling and leads him along a path to attempt to uncover the mystery
of his heritage. Fogg’s quest to uncover the facts of his past is ultimately unfulfilled, but this
search was essential for him to be able to begin his own life by coming to an understanding that
his past would always remain shrouded in mystery and embedded within a larger story.
Fogg, like Quinn, undergoes a personal crisis of severance from his family after the death
of his Uncle Victor leaves him disconnected from all of his known family members. He
proceeds along a path of disappearance by divorcing himself from all social contacts and
allowing himself to physically wither away due to a restricted financial budget because he
chooses to remain unemployed and isolated. However, whereas Quinn sealed himself from his
memories and his personal identity of the past and did not wish to venture outside of the streets
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of New York City, Fogg does attempt to make contact with his friend, Zimmer, prior to his
personal descent. This effort is what will enable his rescue from homelessness and a period of
recovery that eventually delivers him into mysteries of his buried past beyond the confines of the
city and into the Western frontier of America. In contrast to A.’s painful inhabitance of his
solitude and his meditations upon the subject of memory, I have discussed Quinn’s inability to
dwell within himself because he dissociated from his past and drifted into assuming other
identities that left him severed from his memories and dreams. This dissociation led to his
disappearance because of his repression of the past which rendered him incapable of negotiating
life in the present. Fogg’s loss also leads him into personal dissolution and disappearance from
society, but he survives his crisis because of his desire for connection that will restore a sense of
stability in his identity so that he can eventually strive to author his life into the future.
Structurally, the story of Fogg’s personal dissolution occurs over the opening two
chapters of the novel, and this section is marked by the importance of Marco’s connection with
his Uncle Victor and his influence upon Marco’s imagination. The sudden death of his uncle
propels him into the heart of an identity crisis that leads to his isolation because the loss causes
him to feel that his life has lost meaning: “Not only was Uncle Victor the person I had loved the
most in the world, he was my only relative, my one link to something larger than myself” (3).
Fogg cannot absorb the shock of his loss, and the lack of a larger sense of connection leads to the
dissolution of his identity as Fogg proclaims that he “began to vanish into another world” (3).
He retreats from everyday life, takes refuge solely in his mind, and his absence of a will to
survive is so severe that even his body begins to disappear through his lack of nourishment.
Fogg’s lack of knowledge of, and access to, his patrilineal heritage is suggested overtly
through the history of his family name, and this has a strong effect on Marco because his name
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plays a prominent role regarding his sense of security in his identity and in his notion of being
the author of his life. His uncle had revealed to him that “his father’s name had originally been
Fogelman, but someone in the immigration offices at Ellis Island had truncated it to Fog, with
one g, and this had served as the family’s American name until the second g was added in 1907”
(3). Therefore, the obscurity of his heritage is suggested by the fact that Fogg is a misnomer; it
is a fragment of the original name that has been slightly augmented in the tradition of American
self-creation. The changes in his family name from Fogelman to Fog, and finally to Fogg signify
the abortions and constructions already embedded in his history and prophesizes the limits
inherent in his search for self-knowledge through his past. These changes point to events in the
past that were beyond Fogg’s control and would always be unchangeable, but his uncle’s
imaginative play with his name does encourage Fogg to strive to author his existence despite this
limited access to his past.
Fogg’s name encompasses references to Marco Polo and Phileas Fogg, the hero of
Around the World in Eighty Days. Marco notes that his uncle “never tired of expounding on the
glories hidden in my name. . . . According to him, it proved that travel was in my blood, that life
would carry me to places where no man had ever been before” (6). His imagination is supported
and encouraged by his uncle, and this helped provide Marco with a sense of self-possession and
authorship despite his sense of insecurity and fragility regarding his identity due to the ridicule
he was subjected to during his youth:
Fogg lent itself to a host of spontaneous mutilations: Fag and Frog,
for example, along with countless meteorological references: Snowball
Head, Slush Man, Drizzle Mouth. . . . The o at the end of Marco was
obvious enough, yielding epithets such as Dumbo, Jerko, and Mumbo
Jumbo, but what they did in other ways defied all expectations. Marco
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became Marco Polo; Marco Polo became Polo Shirt; Polo Shirt
became Shirt Face; and Shirt Face became Shit Face. (7)
It is his uncle who transforms his name from the subject of schoolyard ridicule into one of
adventure and glory in proposing that his name suggests great travels. Through the
inventiveness of his uncle’s imagination, Marco’s name takes on a multiplicity of meanings
which are primarily associated with myth and story as opposed to his historical heritage or
boyhood taunts. And in response to the ridicule he receives, Fogg cites his first impulse toward
authoring his life:
This name was so bound up with my sense of who I was that I
wanted to protect it from further harm. When I was fifteen I began
signing all my papers M. S. Fogg, pretentiously echoing the gods of
modern literature, but at the same time delighting in the fact that the
initials stood for manuscript” (7).
But despite his uncle’s encouragement, Fogg never really shakes the severe ridicule he had to
endure from his classmates: “Eventually, I lived through my schoolboy initiation, but it left me
with a feeling for the infinite fragility of my name” (7).
Prior to his uncle’s death, when Marco leaves for college and is separated from him, the
fragility of his identity is foregrounded in his desire “to stay in spiritual contact with him by
wearing the suit” that his uncle gave him: “there were times when I imagined the suit was
actually holding me together” (15). He offers that “I wore it for sentimental reasons. Under my
nonconformist posturing, I was also satisfying the desire to have my uncle near me” (16).
Following his death, Marco decides to read all of the books his uncle had given him, and at this
stage the fragility of Fogg’s condition becomes even more apparent. In his determination, he not
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only wishes to hang onto the memory of his uncle, but also to simulate inhabiting his thoughts
and feelings:
Each time I opened a box, I was able to enter another segment
of my uncle’s life, . . . and it consoled me to feel that I was occupying
the same mental space that Victor had once occupied—reading the
same words, living in the same stories, perhaps thinking the same
thoughts. It was almost like following the route of an explorer from
long ago, duplicating his steps as he thrashed out into virgin
territory. (22)
This simulation serves as a way for Fogg to keep his imagination alive in connection with his
uncle’s encouragement for him to think of himself in terms of an explorer charting his own
course as the author of his story. However, this inspiration and his sense of connection with
Uncle Victor withers as Marco’s sense of reality grows more tenuous while working his way
through the books and proceeding to sell them for cash in order to sustain his barebones
existence in isolation.
Because Marco’s link to his personal history is severely restricted, his main sense of
connection with the past was through his uncle and the man’s eccentric imagination. Therefore,
the death of Uncle Victor serves as the cause for his process of vanishing, and his impending
disappearance is not merely figurative. The bulk of his last remaining physical possessions
connected with his uncle are several boxes of books that were given to him as a gift when he left
for college. The boxes, which Marco had intended to return to his uncle, initially remained
stored in their boxes and served as pieces of furniture throughout his apartment, and therefore,
when he decides to read them and subsequently sell them for cash his furnishings begin to
disappear. His dwindling possessions are dual in nature as the depletion of the books as
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intellectual objects are equivalent to the attrition of practical physical objects as well. Marco is
emptying himself of possessions that remind him of the past and serve a function in the present,
and his increasing weight loss represents his physical disengagement with the world via his
possessions, social contacts, and in his physical being.
Once the strength of the memory of his uncle fades away, it appears that Marco has
indeed used himself up because he has no memories of a father and has very little recollection of
his mother as he reveals, “it is difficult for me to remember what she looked like” (4). What he
does remember paints a portrait of a woman who was detached and lonely: “more often than not
she was dreamy, given to mild sulks, and there were times when I felt a true sadness emanating
from her, a sense that she was battling against some vast and internal disarray” (4). These
comments suggest that Fogg may have absorbed her disposition as a young boy and that this
would unconsciously influence his own urge to detach himself from his friends and isolate
himself. His mother’s inability to deal with her troubles effected Fogg’s inquisitiveness about
his past because his inquiries were thwarted at an early age: “With my father, however, all was a
blank. . . . That was the one subject my mother refused to discuss with me, and whenever I asked
the question, she would not budge” (4). Therefore, Fogg is left in the dark about the source of
his mother’s personal disarray and shame regarding her affair with Solomon Barber, the man
later revealed to be his biological father. The result is that Fogg suppresses his curiosity and
comes to rely upon his imagination: “For want of something to cling to, I imagined him as a
dark-haired version of Buck Rogers, a space traveler who had passed into the fourth dimension
and could not find his way back” (4).
As his memories and possessions dwindle and his body weakens, however, so too does
the potency of his imagination begin to fade in the face of his increasing self-enclosure. He
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comes to the realization that “the mind cannot win out over matter, for once the mind is asked to
do too much” (29), and because of his weakness his connection with the present wanes: “my
mind had begun to drift, and once that happened, I was powerless to stop it” (30). Ultimately, he
is faced with a similar dilemma that A. encountered in “The Book of Memory”:
I had lost the ability to think ahead, and no matter how hard I tried
to imagine the future, I could not see it, I could not see anything at
all. The only future that ever belonged to me was the present I was living
in now, and the struggle to remain in that present had gradually
overwhelmed the rest. . . . each moment the future stood before me as a
blank, a white page of uncertainty. If life was a story, as Uncle Victor had
often told me, and each man was the author of his own story, then I was
making it up as I went along. . . . The question was what I was supposed
to do when the pen ran out of ink. (41-42)
The result is that Marco runs out of money, loses his apartment, and winds up living as a
homeless man in Central Park. He survives being homeless for a few weeks, but he gets
dangerously close to vanishing permanently when he becomes ill and delirious due to his
weakened condition and must take shelter from a rainstorm in a cave in Central Park. In this
account of events, Marco is completely overwhelmed by the present as his body and mind have
weakened to the extent that he can no longer think or create spontaneously, and his only option is
to desperately take refuge in the cave. Despite reaching a state of destitution, his full recovery is
enabled because in the depths of his fall he is rescued by Zimmer and Kitty Wu.
Whereas Quinn isolated himself and disappeared at the conclusion of City of Glass because
he had lost contact with all of his friends and faded away in his isolation as a pseudonymous writer,
Fogg’s migration toward disappearance is aborted due to his desperate effort to make contact with
Zimmer so that he can be saved from a similar fate. Akin to A.’s inhabitance of his room and the
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time required to dwell within himself on 6 Varick St., Fogg is provided with a space for his
recovery in Zimmer’s apartment. The search for Zimmer marks Fogg’s desire to sustain his
connection to life as well as his need to dwell and recover, and this is symbolized through Zimmer’s
name, a German word which translates as room. Fogg’s solitude is therefore accompanied by a
living connection, and this gives him the life support to recover and then venture into the
uncertainty of the future via his journey through his buried past.
The moment in which Fogg is found by Kitty and Zimmer he embellishes his experience
through a literary reference. This provides an initial sign that his imagination is on the mend and
that he is able to contextualize his experience within a larger framework. He was not sure if he
spent two or three days in the cave, though he tells them it was three “because three was a
literary number, the same number of days that Jonah spent in the belly of the whale” (69).
Marco’s experience in the cave prefigures Effing’s story about his cave, and what they both
signify is the importance of recovery and a reinvigoration of the imagination and creativity. His
rescue enables his recovery to proceed so that can begin to take action in the present and begin to
envision possibilities of a future through his ensuing relationship with Kitty. While inside the
cave, Fogg imagined the neon letters of the Moon Palace restaurant sign outside of his apartment
which had initially sparked his imagination when he first moved into the apartment:
the force with which those words assaulted me drowned out every
practical reference and association. They were magic letters, and
they hung there in the darkness like a message from the sky itself. . . .
A bare and grubby room had been transformed into a site of inwardness,
an intersection point of strange omens and mysterious, arbitrary events” (17).
This had occurred prior to his uncle’s death, and it indicates how Marco’s imagination had begun
to dominate his sense of reality while in isolation. He read the words as a magical sign which
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gave meaning to his circumstances and simultaneously helped repress his thoughts and worries
about the future. Inside the cave, however, he imagines the large o’s from Moon and sees
himself dangling dangerously from the enormous letters. This is immediately followed by his
perception that the letters appeared as “gigantic human eyes that were looking down at me with
scorn and impatience” (70). Fogg’s experience of eyes staring at him and doubling in the figure
of letters quickly escalates beyond their merely human character: “I became convinced that they
were the eyes of God” (70). The combination of these images infers the power of language in its
direct Biblical association with creation, or the Word of God, and the danger that is implied
through these images is that Marco is entirely at the mercy of the letters and has given up all
efforts toward authoring his existence.
To this point in the novel, Fogg has survived his descent into oblivion due to feeling
severed from a larger connection after the passing of his final relative, Uncle Victor. His feeling
of finding himself adrift as an orphan was insurmountable for him as he was seemingly unable to
overcome the fragility of his identity with the loss of the one person who offered positive
connotations to his name. He disappears into a fog, resigned to vanish from the world, only to be
saved by a fellow orphan, Kitty, whom he meets serendipitously during his search for Zimmer,
or symbolically speaking, for a room wherein he can rest and recover. The subsequent period in
which he is holed up with Zimmer in solitude prepares him for his journey forward into the roots
of his mysterious past when he takes a job with Thomas Effing. The end of his fall and his sense
of increased stability with his identity becomes apparent during his initial interview with Effing:
“Emmett Fogg,” the old man said, spitting out the words with
contempt. “What kind of a sissy name is that?”
“M. S. Fogg,” I replied. “The M stands for Marco, the S for Stanley.”
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“That’s no better. If anything, it’s worse. What are you going to do
about it, boy?”
“I’m not going to do anything about it. My name and I have been
through a lot together, and I’ve grown rather fond of it over the years.” (101)
The character of Effing, and Fogg’s relationship with him, are central to the novel in
regard to the theme of Fogg authoring his story. Carsten Springer addresses the centrality of
Effing in relation to the novel’s overall structure: “the character’s power as a man who has
managed to create a new identity for himself is also demonstrated by his dominance in the
central part of the novel” (143). Fogg’s time with Effing occupies the middle three chapters of
the novel, and Effing’s position as a forceful and enigmatic figure of command who keeps Fogg
off-balance and has him transcribe the outrageous tale of his life is a crucial passage for Fogg in
coming to an indirect understanding of what is entailed in being the author of one’s life. This
section of the novel, with Effing at its center, can be read symbolically as Fogg’s strange
indoctrination into the art of storytelling.
Effing as a predominant figure is seemingly indecipherable in his introduction through
Fogg’s eyes: “Everything about him was walled off, remote, sphinxlike in its impenetrability”
(99). He is a very old man in a wheelchair, and Fogg notes, “he struck me as the frailest person I
had ever seen. . . . his body slumped to one side like some miniscule broken bird” (99). But it
quickly becomes apparent that Effing is in enigma because even his physical stature is incredibly
difficult to decipher as he comes to life a few moments later during the interview:
He straightened himself up in his chair. It was remarkable how quickly
he transformed his appearance. He was no longer a comatose semi-corpse
lost in a twilight reverie; he had become all sinew and attention, a
seething little mass of resurrected strength. As I eventually learned, this
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was the real Effing, if real is a word that can be used in talking about him.
So much of his character was built on falsehood and deception, it was
nearly impossible to know when he was telling the truth. (99)
This central figure to the story appears as a riddle, is portrayed as entirely unreliable in matters of
factual truth, and his very character presents a challenge to Fogg’s tacit assumptions regarding
the nature of reality. Effing wears eyepatches upon first meeting Fogg, and he is likely blind, but
a degree of uncertainty always lingers for Fogg because of the old man’s penchant for playing
games with his identity as he sometimes removes the patches or wears a single eyepatch. In
other moments, even with the patches on, Marco feels as though Effing were looking at him. His
blindness remains ambiguous physically, and Fogg can find no direct connection with Effing in
regards to sight and vision: “For all the hundreds of hours I spent gazing into them, Effing’s
eyes never told me a thing” (110).
Rather than relying upon vision, Effing is alive through his voice, and the moment he
comes to life is when he verbally challenges Fogg during the interview. The relationship
between Fogg and Effing is characterized by verbal exchange and storytelling, and the period in
which Fogg works for Effing serves as an indoctrination into a place of discovering his voice on
his road toward authoring his existence as a storyteller. As a companion to Effing, Fogg ‘s
primary duties are to read aloud to him and describe the outdoor scenery when he wheels him
through the streets. During these daily walks, Fogg’s role is to actively be the eyes for Effing
and he is immediately berated by Effing for “spouting drivel about ‘your average lamppost’ and
‘perfectly ordinary manhole covers.’  I want to see what we’re looking at, goddamnit, I want
you to make things stand out for me!” (120). The task of detailed description is one which Fogg
had never engaged in previously, and he recognizes, “I had always had a penchant for
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generalizing, for seeing the similarities between things rather than the differences” (121). His
lack of examination of the differences in the external world is intermingled with his personal
crisis in which he was formerly determined to vanish because he defined himself solely through
his connection to his lone remaining family member, Uncle Victor. He had been unable to
sustain his individuality despite his attempt to distinguish himself as M. S. Fogg, and the process
of detailing imagery for Effing and reading stories aloud to him can be viewed as part of his
identity formation as an author through having to carefully focus upon individual details.
The essence of Effing’s character and what Fogg inherits from him is self-described by
Effing and foreshadows the long tale he will orate to Fogg in order to document the ‘true’ story
of his past. On one of their ventures in the city Fogg asks Effing why he doesn’t live in the
country after noticing his pleasure of sitting in a park, and Effing tells him,
I’ve done it, and now it’s all in my head. All alone in the middle of
the wilderness for months, for months and months an entire lifetime.
Once you’ve done that boy, you never forget it. I don’t need to go
anywhere. The moment I start to think about it, I’m back. That’s where
I spend most of my time these days- back in the middle of nowhere. (126)
Effing is the consummate storyteller because he spends most of his time in the middle of
nowhere, a space in which he can creatively spin tales in his head. This is precisely the space
which begins to effect Fogg’s sense of reality while in his presence. While reading to Effing,
Fogg begins to tangibly experience the old man’s mysteriousness and enigmatic character:
“Effing, in his wheelchair, and I on the sofa across from him, and there were times when I
became so engrossed in what I was reading that I hardly knew where I was anymore, that I felt I
was no longer sitting in my own skin” (112). Again, the question of the ‘real Effing’ and the
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matter of his mysterious identity arises in this statement, and when he tells Fogg that he knows
his death is approaching and the tale of his past must be told, Marco will unwittingly find himself
inscribed within the mythic tale of self-creation that is part of his inheritance. He is no longer
seeking shelter and recovering from his recent slide, but his steps toward stabilizing himself are
unsteady as they are directly tied to the mythological Effing.
The tale that gradually unfolds grows increasingly miraculous as Effing reveals that he
used to be Julian Barber, a painter who decided to travel to the West to paint the landscape. The
story which ensues is nothing less than a mythic representation of a journey into the Western
frontier and the formation of a self-made man. It is complete with a near death experience, the
assumption of another identity, an ambush and murder followed by an escape with bags of gold
and a continued migration westward to California. When he reveals that he had previously been
known as Julian Barber and lived overseas after winding up in a wheelchair, Effing boasts of the
stories he made up about his condition: “I made up several stories, each one an improvement on
the ones that came before it. I’d pull them out according to the circumstances and my mood,
always changing them slightly as I went along” (130). His comment highlights the likelihood
that the tale he urges Marco to transcribe may be complete fabrication. In fact, as their
relationship develops and they are deeper into Effing’s story, Fogg states that “his narrative had
taken on a phantasmagoric quality. . . and there were times when he did not seem to be
remembering the outward facts of his life so much as inventing a parable to explain its inner
meanings” (183).
Effing’s believability is always open to question, and prior to telling his tale, Marco read
several adventure stories and travel diaries to him as part of his companionship to the old man.
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Among these were narratives by John Wesley Powell, Sir John Mandeville, Cabeza de Vaca, and
eighteenth and nineteenth century captivity stories. Fogg comments, “These readings were not a
form of recreation so much as a line of pursuit, a dogged investigation of certain precise and
narrow subjects.” (110) This pursuit enables Effing to fill his head with an amalgam of details
prior to spinning his yarn about his own adventures in the West as Julian Barber. Carsten
Springer comments on Effing’s motivation behind his story: “Effing is no longer interested in the
establishment of factual truth but in authorial control” (144). As Effing orates his tale he offers
that “the land is too big out there, and after a while it starts to swallow you up in the end it’s
all a figment. The only place you exist is in your head” (156). The question of what are truly
Effing’s personal memories and what are a collaboration of tales that he listened to and
processed during Fogg’s recent readings serves to highlight Effing’s impenetrability, his
sphinxlike character, and that the bulk of his story may be in his head as pure invention and have
little to do with personal recall.
One of the most relevant life-changing events that Effing conveys to Fogg is an apparent
encounter with Nikola Tesla, whom Effing portrays as a strange and mysterious figure: “he was
like a prophet of the future age, and no one could resist him. The total conquest of nature! A
world in which every dream was possible!” (144). Effing describes the encounter as a pivotal
life-altering moment:
our eyes met and I could feel him looking right through me as though I
didn’t exist When Tesla’s eyes went through me, I experienced my
first taste of death I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden I
understood that my life was my own. (146)
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It is in this moment, as Julian Barber, that Effing says he decided to become a painter and give
up a more secure financial path available to him as the son of a prominent business tycoon.
Tesla comes across as a transcendent figure who inspires Effing to take a hold of his own life and
transcend his heritage. However, the movement toward transcendence leads to disaster for
Julian Barber and results in the complete obliteration of his existence and the eventual formation
of himself as Thomas Effing, with the creation of his surname, Effing, as a pun for “the man who
fucked his life” (184).
The significance of Effing’s story regarding his encounter with Tesla is his experience of
transcendence and a heightened sense of mortality that occurs in a meeting of the eyes between
the two men. Since Effing’s eyes are completely inaccessible to Marco and never reveal
anything to him, Marco can only relate to Effing through his words and voice, and this
connection imbues Fogg with a feeling of immanence as opposed to Effing’s experience of
transcendence:
His voice never seemed to let him down. I began to live inside that
voice as though it were a room He was alone with the story in his
head, and I was alone with the words that poured from his mouth.
Those words filled every inch of air around me, and in the end there
was nothing else for me to breathe. (183-4)
Though Marco feels the tale is preposterous, it is the words and voice of Effing which envelope
Marco and cause him to ascertain an element of truth in his narrative. He identifies with the
outlandishness of the tale by reflecting on the improbability of his own story in which he
survived his brief period in a cave and then landed a job as scribe and companion to the strange
old man who will later be revealed to be Fogg’s grandfather:
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The hermit’s cave, the saddlebags of money, the Wild West shootoutit was all so farfetched, and yet the very outrageousness of the story
was probably its most convincing element. . . . I could not help thinking
of him as a kindred spirit. Perhaps it started when we got to the episode
of the cave. (183)
The experience of solitude in the cave that Effing claims to have lived within for months has
been internalized to such an extent that he passes on this feeling to Marco who finds himself
enshrouded within Effing’s tale. Fogg identifies with Effing’s tale because the old man taps into
transcendent themes of loneliness and loss which Fogg has experienced and identifies with. His
voice speaks to the importance of language as well as the notion of authoring existence through
the imagination and the depths of the sonorous word.
Even though Fogg experiences a strong sense of identification with Effing, the
outrageousness of his tale and the self-mythologizing of Effing also serves to create distance.
Fogg is wrapped inside Effing’s presence and his story yet he is simultaneously aware of their
separation and lack of connection. Shortly following his expression of kinship, Fogg notes,
“Effing wore the black patches over his eyes almost constantly now, and there was no chance to
deceive myself into thinking there was some connection between us” (184). They are bloodrelated, but Fogg’s knowledge of his bloodline is less important than his paradoxical relationship
to Effing as Fogg realizes that they share similar experiences and yet are completely separate as
individuals. While Effing’s blindness remains indeterminate as a physical fact, the black
eyepatches he wears are symbolic of his choice to close his eyes on his former life as Julian
Barber. The telling of the tale to Fogg will eventually shore up the gaps in Fogg’s knowledge of
his past, but Effing endures as an enigma and Fogg’s lineage will always be shrouded in the fog
of his truncated name. What really happened to Julian Barber and how he became Thomas
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Effing will remain mysterious but what Effing does communicate through the yarns he spins are
myths, and he sets the groundwork for Fogg to become a storyteller through his job of reading
and bringing details to life for Effing before Marco embarks upon a journey that will eventually
lead to his own narrative account of the past.
Fogg’s relationship with his past will ultimately be characterized by Effing’s
phantasmagoria because the old man is the grandfather he never knew, and even in the flesh,
there remains a question regarding the nature of his reality. He is an example, par excellence, of
the American self-made man who ventured through the rugged Western frontier and survived to
tell the tale under a new name. However, Fogg is well aware of Effing’s deceits and his
penchant for invention, and he is therefore cognizant of the fact that Effing’s tale is a parable
embellished through Fogg’s readings as opposed to anything approaching a factual account. In
this way, Effing’s life as a man who went mad and self-destructed serves as a caution to Fogg
regarding the potential consequences of the excesses of mythic self-creation. Paradoxically,
however, it is because of his period with Effing that Fogg would travel through the West and
come to comprehend the meaning of Effing’s portrayal of feeling overwhelmed and obliterated
by the vastness of the frontier. The question as to whether Effing ever traveled through the land
or merely spun yarns based on travel narratives and myths of the West will always remain
uncertain, and it is this ambiguity through which Fogg must travel in order to discover who his
father is and that his knowledge of his heritage ends with the enigmatic Effing, the self-made
man who fucked his life.
Effing is a self-created man, an inventor of his identity, and his presence exemplifies that
the only available model of inheritance to Fogg is to become a storyteller if he wants to
creatively author his life. The West represents a timeless location ripe with the potential for
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mythological self-creation where old identities and tradition can be shed and familial lineage is
defined through myths associated with the land. It is a place of mythic transcendence, though the
experience of the frontier includes violence and destruction, and this is also a vital aspect to
Effing’s tale. Springer offers that Effing’s wild west tale symbolizes the limits of the psyche:
“Auster significantly chooses the frontier areas of the American West for Effing’s story of an
artistic quest. These areas become the setting for the character’s confrontation with the frontier
in his own psyche” (142). While direct familial heritage is clandestinely present in their
exchange, it is the process of engagement in the story and transcribing of Effing’s words that are
crucial for Fogg as part of his indoctrination as a storyteller as he will have to destroy his
childhood fantasies about his past in his efforts to author his existence.
Once Effing finishes with his story about the Western frontier and covers the pun which
becomes his new identity, he ends his tale and reveals that he wants a copy sent to Solomon
Barber, the son he has never known. Though Effing spent twenty years in Paris and lived in
virtual anonymity for another thirty years in New York he dismisses these periods as
unimportant as he has selected the important details that were pertinent to his transition from one
identity to another that are to be passed on in the form of a parable to his son. His anonymity
allows him to stay hidden from the world and be in absolute control of other’s perceptions
through his tales: “I liked being dead, and after it got written in the papers, I was able to stay
dead” (129). He was the creator of a personal orphanage by negating his previous life as the
unsuccessful painter, Julian Barber. This negation included the abandonment of his son,
Solomon Barber, who subsequently abandons Marco through his affair with Fogg’s mother, and
so they both inherit the status of bastard sons. As Effing created these conditions through his
abandonment, he also possessed the power to shore up this distance before dying by giving
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Barber, and subsequently Fogg, their pasts: “Everyone has a right to know his past. I can’t do
much for him but at least I can do that” (198). His fantastic tale, however fabricated, serves as a
symbolic attempt to explain his departure and personal degradation in an effort to give Solomon
Barber a story that connects him with his past. Of course, the irony is that Effing’s tale is
superfluous to Barber, but with Fogg as the deliverer of the story Barber is reconnected with the
past that he abandoned as well. The story will connect Barber with an extraordinary mythology
of his father, but more importantly, it will connect he and Fogg to their buried pasts.
Once they establish personal contact and Barber knows that Marco is his son, Solomon
decides to move to New York to be in close contact with him. It is the subject of the cave that
will bind them as Barber keeps his identity hidden from Marco and suggests that they travel west
in search of Effing’s cave:
“Ah, the cave,” I repeated. “The enigmatic cave in the desert.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like one of those old songs that
keep playing in my head.”
“An old song. An old story. There’s no getting rid of it. But how
do we know there was a cave?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you. You were the one who heard
the story. What do you say, M. S.? Was he telling the truth or not?”
Before I could gather my wits to answer him, Kitty leaned forward
on her elbow, looked to her left at me, looked to her right at Barber,
and then summed up the whole complicated problem in two sentences.
“Of course he was telling the truth,” she said. “His facts might not
always have been correct, but he was telling the truth.” (276)
The cave is a symbolic mystery which they share, and the power of Effing’s story, his mythos, is
the cornerstone of their pasts as it becomes the central mystery that links them to their strange
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heritage. Effing will forever be a riddle as the consummate trickster storyteller, but the truth of
his central command in this position is undeniable as Barber and Fogg’s lives have been
significantly shaped by Effing’s decision to sever himself from his past.
Fogg and Kitty’s relationship ends when Kitty becomes pregnant and Marco will not
consent to her desire for an abortion. Their dispute causes them to split, but Kitty’s decision to
get an abortion ends the possibility of another orphan in the lineage that Effing created. The split
also delivers Fogg into his past and through the terrain of the West where he will come to a
better understanding of the meaning of Effing’s tale and can subsequently take hold of his own
life. Following their break-up, Fogg stays with Barber until he shakes Marco out of his
despondence and convinces him to head west together to look for Effing’s cave:
Perhaps it was the sheer hopelessness of the venture that clinched it
for me. . . The idea of a useless quest, of setting out on a journey that
was doomed to failure appealed to my sense of things at that moment. . .
Only the going itself would matter, and in the end we would be left with
nothing but the futility of our ambitions. This was a metaphor I could
live with, the leap into the emptiness I had always dreamed of. (288)
Fogg is once again navigating the unknown, and at this point he relishes the opportunity. The
revelation concerning Barber’s identity is characterized by violence when they visit the
gravesites of Victor and Emily Fogg.
Barber’s identity is unveiled in the midst of an emotional unraveling for both of them at
the gravesites as Marco, in his confusion and anger, causes a sobbing Barber to stumble and fall
into an open grave. He descends into a coma and Fogg sits with him in the hospital and watches
him transform as his tremendous bulk shrinks: “as the bloat of fat cells and puffy flesh continued
to subside, a second Barber came up to the surface, a secret self that had been locked inside him
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for years” (296). When Barber awakens from the coma he tells Fogg the story of his affair with
Emily, but Marco stubbornly resists accepting his story until he can no longer deny full
recognition of what he witnesses in Barber’s transformation: “I finally understood what I had
been seeing. . . . I found myself studying the contour of his eyelids. . . and all of a sudden I
realized that I was looking at myself” (296). Fogg’s outburst and Barber’s misstep leads to the
death of Marco’s father, therefore, almost as quickly as Fogg discovers who his father is he loses
him. The event fills the gap in his lack of knowledge and also breaks down any lingering
fantasies wherein his father existed as a fantastic and heroic figure. It is a crucial event for Fogg,
and he will continue westward in search of Effing’s cave in order to gain first-hand experience of
what Effing meant by ‘the middle of nowhere’, and yet he will also demythologize the
extravagance of the old man’s tale.
Following Barber’s funeral, and a final futile attempt to see if Kitty will take him back,
Marco unleashes his emotions upon the furnishings of a cheap motel room and assesses that “I
had finally done something logical, something truly worthy of the occasion” (302). This episode
and his outburst upon Barber point to the elements of destruction that are also an important step
in Fogg’s movement toward beginning a new life for himself. His tirades, however, are not selfdestructive like Effing’s annihilation of his previous identity, but rather, they help him to push
ahead and continue the quest he set on despite Barber’s death and his separation from Kitty:
I would do what Barber and I had set out to do in the first place, I
decided, and knowing that I had a purpose, that I was not running away
from something so much as going toward it, gave me the courage to
admit to myself that I in fact did not want to be dead. (303)
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In contrast to his early descent in New York City when he was determined to wither away and
vanish, Fogg affirms the future however uncertain and bleak it may appear. He pushes on and
opens himself up to the frontier, and in only a few days he senses the truth within Effing’s tales:
I felt that I was beginning to understand some of the things Effing
had talked about. . . that the hugeness and emptiness of the land had
begun to effect my sense of time. The present seemed to no longer bear
any of the same consequences. Minutes and hours were too small to be
measured in this place, and once you opened your eyes to the things
around you, you were forced to think in terms of centuries, to understand
that a thousand years is no more than the tick of the clock. (303)
Fogg is taken completely out of himself and delivered into the vastness of the landscape where
he feels a connection larger than himself in a way he had never been able to previously. His
search ends when he visits an old couple who verify the cave’s existence in association with
Effing’s tale, but tell him that he “wouldn’t get nowhere looking for it now” (304) because it is
buried under Lake Powell. This literal fact is metaphorically significant regarding the permanent
inaccessibility as to whether Effing lived in the cave or not, and this significance is conveyed
through an associative doubling of Lake Powell and John Wesley Powell, the author of
Expeditions Down the Colorado River, a narrative that likely served as a key source for Effing’s
tale. What is relevant is that Fogg has identified with a sublime truth in Effing’s tale which
enables him to complete his journey through his heritage and understand that he has moved on
toward a new chapter in his life which he alone can begin to author through personal experience:
Once I reached the end of the continent, I felt that some important
question would be resolved for me. I had no idea what that question
was, but the answer had already been formed in my steps, and I had only
to keep walking to know that I had left myself behind, that I was no
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longer the person I had once been. (306)
On his journey west his car is stolen, and he injures his ankle and is laid up in a small town
where he is seduced by a waitress. His adventures are not fantastic and his story is not
mythologized like Effing’s, but he has passed through his patriarchal lineage and is on the road
to “authoring his own life” (7) after continuing his journey to the Pacific. His tales are more
commonplace than heroic, though the enigmatic Effing is central to Fogg’s personal narrative.
Marco is essentially still living within Effing’s story until he embarks upon his own adventure
westward so that he can finally come to terms with his past and escape Effing’s script by
traveling through “the middle of nowhere” (156) and accrue his own experiences. Springer
suggests that “only by finding out the correspondences between himself and his male progenitors
does the protagonist find out about himself” (149). Fogg needed the sublime experience of
traveling through the West in order to reach a point of a new beginning so that he can truly be the
author of his own life. And his account, as the narrator of the novel, places his identity in
context within a larger inheritance which he has selectively authored. Marco searches for
himself through his unknown past and comes to the realization of the importance of storytelling
as opposed to finding definitive answers. The journey cannot lead him to anything definitive
except to serve as a launching point toward his own self-creation. He no longer lives in the fog
without his past nor is he wrapped within Effing’s enigmatic stories, but rather, he encounters his
own emptiness which he comes to terms with and mythologizes: “I had come to the end of the
world, and beyond it there was nothing but air and waves, an emptiness that went clear to the
shores of China. This is where I start, I said to myself, this is where my life begins” (306). He
survives the journey through the literal and metaphorical terrain of his personal heritage, and
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therefore, he can tell the tale of his struggles and adventures and become the “author of his own
story” (42).
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Conclusion
I agree with Auster when he remarks, “there’s always some indefinable something that
makes you attend to a writer’s work – you can never put your finger on it, but that something is
what makes all the difference” (AH 274). In an attempt to express my own draw to Auster’s
work, I can very generally comment upon my admiration of his ability to combine
philosophically introspective narratives that challenge the reader’s tacit assumptions about
everyday reality in an entertaining fashion. At a deeper level, as I have tried to illustrate in this
thesis, I feel that he deals with essential human questions and mysteries regarding our particular
fates. He invites readers to think about the extent to which we can author our identities and
control our own destinies in the face of chance events and forces which remain well beyond our
control and capacity to fully understand or untangle. His work suggests that the creative act
requires an acceptance that our lives are beyond our control, but that one must be willing to
embrace uncertainty and the forces of contingency and enter into a relationship with the
unknown, or emptiness, at the heart of the creative act in order to remain open to the present
moment and actively create into the future. Auster continuously returns to the perplexing
question of identity and the instability of living as we are always subject to the unexpected and
chance events which contain the potential to significantly alter the course of our lives and our
self-perceptions.
I have not focused upon the subject of chance in the texts I have explored, though it is a
prominent theme in Auster’s work and has played a part in my own process of completing this
thesis. As a primary example, I quote the following words of Auster which I did not discover
until the end of this project:
Suddenly a crisis occurs when everything about ourselves is called into
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question, when the ground drops out from under us. I think it’s at those
moments when memory becomes a most powerful force in our lives. You
begin to explore the past, and invariably you come up with a new reading
of the past, a new understanding, and because of that you’re able to
encounter the present in a new way. (Irwin 114)
These words serendipitously confirmed a prominent theme I have read in these texts that I had
not seen discussed at great length in previous scholarly criticism on Auster’s work. For Auster,
what does lie within our control is the opportunity to dwell with our memories in solitude and
explore them in order to shift our relationship with the past, and therefore, open the door to
alternate self-conceptions and fresh possibilities of engagement with life in the present. This, in
my view, is a central concern in the three texts that I have explored.
Auster’s philosophical concerns with identity, with what it means to exist and live a fully
human life, are inextricably bound with memory and the importance of exploring the past in
order to attain a deeper conception of one’s place in the world. This exploration enables the
potential to resituate oneself through a narrative process, and it thereby offers hope for
constructing a future through a deeper engagement with the present. This theme is perhaps so
elemental to Auster’s work that it may be easy to overlook because his fiction is engaging,
moving, and humorous as well as challenging and enigmatic. Throughout his entertaining and
sometimes beguiling storytelling, narrative is foregrounded as a vital component to each
protagonist’s success or failure to work through crises and come to a better understanding of his
place in the world in the present, and therefore achieve some stability and be capable of striving
to create into the future. A. and Marco Fogg succeed in delivering themselves from the depths of
their crises while Quinn fails to be up to the task and disappears. The characters in these texts
must face uncertainty and the instability inherent in living in order to be impelled to search
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themselves and draw upon their inner resources, or else, Auster suggests, they will lose an
essential core of themselves and vanish in isolation by failing to work through the darker aspects
of their interiors.
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Works Cited
Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. 1982. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
-------. The New York Trilogy. 1985, 1986, 1986. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
-------. Moon Palace. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
-------. The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1992.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Trans. by Maria Jolias. Boston: Beacon Press,
1964.
Barone, Dennis. “Auster’s Memory.” The Review of Contemporary American Fiction, Vol. 14,
No. 1, Spring 1994, 32-34.
-------. “Introduction: Auster and the Postmodern Novel.” In Beyond the Red Notebook. Ed. by
Dennis Barone. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Pp. ??.
Burgard, Joseph Daniel. Mirrors Seeking Their Own Reflections. San Francisco: SFSU, 1994.
De Unamuno, Miguel. The Tragic Sense of Life. Trans. by J. E. Crawford Flitch. New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1954.
Farrell, Grace. “Mourning in Poe’s Pym.” In Richard Kopley, ed., Poe’s Pym: Critical
Explorations. Durham, N.C.: Duke U.P., 1992. Pp. 107-116.
Fredman, Stephen. “‘How to Get Out of the Room That Is the Book?’ Paul Auster and the
Consequences of Confinement.” Postmodern Culture 6.3 (1996): 1-29.
Garzilli, Enrico. Circles Without Center. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Grella, George. “The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel.” In Robin W. Winks, ed., Detective
Fiction: a collection of critical essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. Pp.
103-120.
Irwin, Mark. “Memory’s Escape: Inventing The Music of Chance--- A Conversation with Paul
Auster.” Denver Quarterly 28.3 (1994): 111-122.
Modell, Arnold. Imagination and the Meaningful Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
-------. Other Times, Other Realities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
-------. The Private Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
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Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales. Ed. By David Van Leer. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998.
Rowen, Norma. “The Detective in Search of the Lost Tongue of Adam: Paul Auster’s City of
Glass.” Critique, Vol. XXXII, No. 4, Summer 1991, 224-233.
Shiloh, Ilana. Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: on the road to nowhere. New York: Peter
Lang, 2002.
Sorapure, Madeleine. “The Detective and the Author.” In Beyond the Red Notebook. Ed. by
Dennis Barone. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Pp. 71-87.
Storr, Anthony. Solitude: A Return to the Self. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: the theory and practice of self-conscious fiction. London & New
York: Routledge, 1984.
Yarmark, Michael. Clarity and Enigma: the art of disappearance in The New York Trilogy.
San Francisco: SFSU, 1995.