City of Glass Essay

At the close of the world’s first international conflict, society grappled for understanding in a world that no longer made sense. This desire for order and reason, led to the development of the detective fiction genre and the transformation of â€Å"dime novels† into true literary works. Paul Auster takes the conventional elements of the mystery genre, and inverts them completely in his post-modern novel, City of Glass. In this way, Auster uses his work to satirize the conventions of the past and draw attention to the ever-increasing chaos of the modern day. Daniel Quinn, is simply a hermit in a vibrant city, trying to erase all aspects of his previous life. He writes mystery novels for the same reason they were written in the 20’s, because they represent a figment of order that is lacking in the world. Especially in a world that takes the life a young boy who hasn’t seen much. Quinn’s desire to separate himself from who he was before he lost his family, leads him to adopt fragments of his character Max Work into his own personality. The detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through the morass of objects and evens 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† (8). This connection to the fictional world he created, entraps Quinn in the world of the private investigator, as if he willed himself onto the ontological level Work inhabits. His inability to separate his personal life from his â€Å"Work† fostered the parasite that sucked the very life out of Quinn, forcing him to find host in a new identity. The traditional private eye embodied in Work is the hard-boiled â€Å"tough guy† who has all the keys to solving our problems. Leaving Quinn to be the ultimate puzzle that needs solving. By distorting the traditional convention of the problem solver and turning him into the problem, Auster begins to suggest that nothing in this world is actually certain or concrete. And that identity is really just a figment of imagination, and the more your indulge your mind, the more your body begins to give way until, â€Å" the more Quinn seemed to vanish, the more persistent Work’s presence in that world became† (9). The mystery novel represents a world where the truth always conquers, Quinn’s attachment to this genre stems from his loss, and the more he re-focalizes his life, the less he has to deal with the reality of grief. Auster depicts mystery this way because it demonstrates the grand delusion of the human race, the belief that there is reason in this world. Quinn as a detective does not represent order as many of his predecessors did, instead he embodies the chaos that is this world, and the lack of understanding that heightens with every new discovery and every interaction. By inverting the traditional private eye, Auster successfully shows the plight of man, the struggle to piece together the puzzle that creates ones identity. Quinn is not a detective trying to finding meaning in the Stillman case, rather he is searching for understanding in his own life, a search that has no answers and leads no where, but to insanity. Legendary crime writer, Richard Knox, established a set of parameters for the detective genre, stating that such a novel â€Å"must have as its main interest the unraveling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end. † In every way, City of Glass contradicts this statement, and yet it is still considered to be a mystery fiction, which begs the question: what are the post-modern parameters for this genre? City of Glass is a novel that opens with a mystery; however, the more that is discovered and uncovered, the more the endpoint is obscured, until the conclusion is even more perplexing than any other part of the story. Auster uses uncertainty and chance to disrupt the conventional ways of detective fiction. When Quinn is caught between the two potential Stillman’s in station, there was no way to know for certain which one was the right one, and it is not until late in the story that the question is answered, but by that time, its not even a question. Quinn had accepted what he saw and did as fact, which goes against the key detail he expresses in a detective story. â€Å"In a good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant† (9). This type of detail-orientated thinking is the first thing that goes in Auster’s novel. Although every sentence may hold the key to the mystery, Quinn and the reader begin to overlook these minor details, accepting that nothing in life is ever certain, and that the traditional fluidity of this genre no longer holds stock in this story. Auster is constantly using his own plot twists and minor details to prove that in the end, nothing exists but chance. Auster purposefully leaves pieces of the story open, to contradict Knox’s definition of mystery. The lack of conclusion with regards to how the Stillman’s got Quinn’s number, what happened to Peter and Virginia, the connection to Auster (character and author), and the narrator’s role in the whole novel, is unsatisfactory and rather uncharacteristic of a mystery. There were moments when the text was difficult to decipher, but I have done my best with it and have refrained from any interpretation. The red notebook, of course, is only half the story, as any sensitive reader will understand† (158). We never get the other half of the story though, which leaves the possibility that Quinn/Wilson/Work/Auster/Dark is just a crazy man who loses himself in a quest to find rational explaination, but for the sake for faith in the narrative, its better to believe that the story is not just some random man’s mumblings. However taking into account Quinn’s role in the novel, and the role his notebook plays, the inability to separate the informational source from this deluded main character unravels the reliability that should be present in a crime fiction. Auster’s intentions were to challenge convention, to prove that no world is as open and shut as a Phillip Marlowe case, to prove that in reality, life is a series of chance happenings that shape identity and action, down to the very last word. Auster’s depictions of the neo-detective fiction are all in an attempt to change the perception of the need for a restoring order. He uses a character that contradicts the traditional private eye, to demonstrate how the search for understanding is one that leads to insanity. The human world is naturally in state of entropy and Auster’s novel uses the conventions of mystery writing to satirize the search for greater reason.