"Changes, then more changes still."

photo courtesy of: Michael Kenna: His brilliant photos profile the tone of "nothing," "nowhere," and "nobody." Those displayed are from his New York City series, featuring Grand Central Station.

If you distill Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” of its impressive plot intricacies and sweeping symbolism, you are most likely left with a vague series of locations and aimless wanderings. In this story, a character’s sense of self is defined by his sense of place, and quite often, by his disconnect from it. Daniel Quinn must ultimately resort to the visual to decipher Peter Stillman’s intentions—murderous or not—operating under the philosophy that Quinn himself lives by: that you know a man best by the path he walks.

There is a synonymity between Quinn and Stillman. Both are wanderers, walkers of places: “As he walked up Riverside Drive, 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” (Auster 143). For both Quinn and Stillman, “City of Glass” is about their processes of place-and-self-integration. Auster writes of Quinn, “Remarkable as it seems, no one ever noticed Quinn. It was as though he had melted into the walls of the city” (178). And as far as Quinn from tell from his post in the alley, the Stillmans (both Sr. and Jr.) have done the same. Decidedly isolated from the locations that would bring Quinn back to reality, and to his case’s imminent solution, place and self become one and the same. This deminishes the possibility for actual places to provide any insight, and completely eliminates the significance of time. ...

In “City of Glass,” time acts as a marker, but also as a “noplace.” From the very beginning of the book, Auster (author, not character) writes in a bizarre mix of present, future, and conditional tense, always pointing to the inevitable future in which Quinn “would later forget” or “would later come to realize.” The thematical concepts of “nowhere” and “everywhere” merge, as do “nobody” and “everybody.” When Quinn finally tracks down the real Paul Auster and is introduced to his son Daniel, Daniel proclaims, “Everybody’s Daniel!” (157) It is the moments like these that foreshadow Quinn’s final goal to become one of the “numerous [people] with nothing to do, nowhere to go” (160). And when he does, he comfortably and silently realizes that the complete expulsion of all material goods is what gives him the most grounded sense of self and place.

With the elimination of meaning from place goes the elimination of meaning from objects. In the beginning, Quinn and Stillman are conjoined in spirit by their red notebooks. But then Stillman deconstructs Quinn’s notion of the object: “You see, the world is in fragments, sir. Not only have we lost our sense of purpose, we have lost the language whereby we can speak of it. These are no doubt spiritual matters, but they have their analogue in the material world. My brilliant stroke has been to confine myself to physical things, to the immediate and tangible” (120). If you change the function of an object, he says, it’s form changes, as with an umbrella when it’s fabric is torn off. You can no longer call it what it was. In the end, the notebook is the only thing that continues to give roots to Quinn’s sense of self and place. And he is left to write with the deaf mute’s pen, a symbol whose significance only increases with Quinn’s voluntary collapse into nothingness.

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