Paul auster the new york trilogy PDF

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ANALYSIS OF THE NEW YORK TRILOGY BY PAUL AUSTER IN TERMS OF POSTMODERNISIM Abstract The New York Trilogy is one of the best examples of detective genres and postmodernist works. Paul Auster got his current fame with The New York Trilogy, consisting of three novellas, which are all against conventional novels in terms of its theme and style. It consists of: City of Glass (1985), about a crime novelist that finds himself in a mystery; Ghosts (1986) about a private eye and observer, Blue, who is gazing at a man named Black, in the service of a client named White; The Locked Room (1986) about a story of an author who tries to perceive the identity while looking for the life of a missing writer for a biography. Keywords: genre, postmodernist, conventional, mystery. 1. Introduction According to Menteşe, post-modernism is to question the nature of everything that surrounds our life. It is an approach which entails to interrogate the reality of our common beliefs. This way of thinking especially stems from the distrust that the European people feel for each other. Post-modernism claims that the world is in a chaos and it is impossible to explain this through formulas (1). That is to say, while the term “post modernity” refers to the way the world has changed due to developments in the political, social, economic, and media spheres, postmodernism refers to a set of ideas developed from philosophy and theory and related to aesthetic production(2). It can be put forward that it is quite suitable to analyze The New York Trilogy in terms of postmodernism since the characters in the novellas are always in pursuit of truth. The aim of this paper is to analyze New York Trilogy in terms of identity problems and search for possibility. All of the books in some way or another are related to each other. The close relationship among these stories will be taken into consideration regarding the elements of postmodernism. The genre of New York Trilogy is detective fiction. According to Nicol, the detective is a figure whose job is to decode signs and impose narrative order upon an apparently chaotic mass of detail. The reader consequently becomes a “literary” detective engaged in a similar process of interpretation to the detective, doubling him in quest to decode a series of signs and arrive at a final meaning. There is no beginning or finalization in New York Trilogy. In all of the novellas, the characters take the place of an investigator as the writers of a fiction. Quinn describes the features of a detective as; The detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through his 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. The reader sees the world through the detective’s eyes, if for the first time (3) (p.10). Paranoid reading, which means that readers are actively involved in solving the puzzles in the stories, is central to the subgenre of detective fiction known variously as the “metaphysical” detective story, the “antidetective” story or the “post-modern” detective story. This form of fiction is a particularly postmodern phenomenon. It deploys the techniques of meta-fiction and inter-texuality, frequently referencing classic detective stories. In particular, postmodern detective fiction draws the reader into the activity of “paranoid reading” only to frustrate his or her efforts of interpretation (2). The aim of this paper is to analyze New York Trilogy in terms of identity problems and search for possibility. 2. About the Novel The New York Trilogy is a group of mystery novels, written by Paul Auster and published by Faber and Faber in 1987. Despite the fact that they seem to deal with different topics because of their names, they have lots of things in common. The word “trilogy” combines these stories together under the same title. For example, all of them include a main character who searches for someone. Readers have some doubts in their minds

whether these characters are mad or not at the end of each book. In addition, these three books take place in New York as its name suggests. 2.1 First Novella: City of Glass The first novella of the trilogy is City of Glass. In this story, there is a character named Daniel Quinn. His wife and son died. At the very beginning of the text, he receives phone calls from a stranger who actually calls detective, Paul Auster. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not (p.3) Although the protagonist ignored the called at first, he decided to pretend like Paul Auster later on and meets the man who calls him, Stillman. He fears that his father who abused him when he was young will be released from prison and kill him. For that reason he wants to hire a private detective and follow him wherever he goes. Quinn is a writer of detective stories and he published his works under the name of William Wilson. It can be said that he is similar to Paul Auster and Daniel Quinn is a double of the author, because, both are writing detective fiction. When the novella is taken into consideration, both characters are in the role of a detective. Additionally, the author tells us why he decided to write detective novels via Quinn; What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In a good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence and no word that is not significant (p. 9) In this respect, it is clear that these sentences may belong to the author himself rather than the character in the story. The author expresses the reader why he decided to write detective stories and his personal opinions. The character loses his identity and cannot decide whether he is real or fictitious. For this reason, the author calls him with different names such as Max Work or Wilson. Furthermore, glasses are very allegorical in the story. For example, readers can regard glass as mirrors. With the help of mirrors, people can see their faces and their personal appearances. However, mirrors are not good enough to show us our inner world. This is also the case in City of Glass. That is to say, readers cannot know how each character is alike. They are confused. Quinn lives like a ghost after losing his family and his thoughts are not clear although the glasses are transparent. The obscurity occurs when Quinn goes to find Peter Stillman at the railway station, because, another man resembling him appears and the protagonist cannot decide which one is real. Quinn chooses one of them and follows him wherever he goes. He turned around and saw the first Stillman shuffling off in the other direction. Surely, this was his man. This shabby creature, so broken down and disconnected from his surroundings-surely this was the mad Stillman (p.68) Although Stillman is characterized as a man who has suffered from his father’s mental and physical torture, he is a good example in reflecting a truth. In such a world, one can never be sure of other’s identity as well of that of himself. Through the end of the novella Stillman commits suicide by jumping from the bridge and thus readers can never know whether Daniel has chosen the correct Stillman or not, because Daniel found the young Stillman’s house empty when he arrived there. One possibility is that Stillman has found his son and killed him.Another one is that young Stillman escaped before his father found him.There is no certainity in the novella. Besides Marco Polo, there is a reference to another writer; Edgar Allan Poe. It is known that Poe, like Paul Auster, is also the writer of detective stories. By the end of the text, according to the postmodern anti-detective reading, Quinn’s desire for solid truths leads him to a climax, in which he writes himself into sheer textuality, demonstrating how subjectivity is ultimately fractured, partial, and textual. As Alison Russell argues that “Quinn literally vanishes from the text when he runs out of space in his red notebook”(4). Although it seems to be a detective fiction on the surface when looking at the so-called interrogations and detailed descriptions of time such as “six-forty-one train”, this novella turns out to be anti-detective novels in terms of the impossibility of obtaining a meaning through not only the mysteries but also life as a whole(5).

All in all, Quinn suddenly disappears leaving a red notebook which is the evidence of his existence and the readers are exposed to understand the end of the story themselves. For this reason, it can be easily claimed that this Novella City of Glass generally searches for the possibilities, real identity and authorship which bases the term “postmodernism”. 2.2. Second Novella: Ghosts Ghosts is the second novella of The New York Trilogy. Like the previous one, this novella includes a private detective as a main character. His name is Blue and he was asked to watch a mysterious man called Black by Mr. White. Mr. Blue moves into a new flat across from Mr. Black and starts his job as a private detective. While doing this, he loses all of his contacts including his fiancée. It is clear that Auster goes on his investigation into lost identity because of the fact that he calls the characters as Blue, White and Black rather than giving them real names. The author gives the protagonists abstract names in order to relate them with the title. It is possible to find the examples of doubling during the novella. In the story, Blue was hired to watch Black. While watching Black, Blue realizes that Black is like the mirror of himself. That is to say, Black reflects all the characteristics of Blue in terms of personality. It can be also put forward that, Blue only looks at himself through windows because of the fact that the mirror reflects oneself. For in spying out at Black across the street it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror and instead of merely watching another he finds that he is also watching himself (p. 171) Blue’s question of identity also comes to the foreground throug his invention of new identities such as a life insurance salesman in order to communicate with Black.However, once again, he fails in creating an identity of his own since each time Black refuses to recognize him and talks to him as if he saw him for the first time.This counts for the fact that it is not the plot, characters, meanings that make the difference, but the story and what happens to the characters throughout the story. Blue feels that he is prisoned in a room. The only thing that he does is to watch someone and write. Although he is aware of being captured by White, he cannot escape from this truth. He has been placed into a locked room. There is no story, no plot, no action - nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book. That's all there is, Blue realizes, and he no longer wants any part of it. But how to get out? (p.202). There are some similarities between this story and the previous one. The central character of both stories is a private detective who is in search of someone. The only difference between these detectives is that Quinn is not a real one. He just pretends to be a detective. The other character Black is like Stillman. They are thought to be criminals by the detectives. In addition to characters, their situation in the stories is similar, in that, they are confined in a room. 2.3. Third Novella: The Locked Room The last novella of The New York Trilogy is The Locked Room the title of which is very relevant to the topics of other stories. This one is also a story of another writer. Fanshawe is the main character and he is the childhood friend of the narrator. He goes to Fanshawe’s house and it reveals that he got lost. Before getting lost, Fanshawe told his wife to find the narrator and give him all of the manuscripts of books and poems that he wrote or burn them. Soon, the narrator reads them and he realizes that they worth publishing. By this way he considers that he can get by. Meanwhile, the narrator falls in love with Fanshawe’s wife and adopts his child despite the fact that he surely knows Fanshawe is not dead. In the story, the narrator takes over Fanshawe’s life. He marries his friend’s wife, adopts his child, and earns money through his writings. What makes all these interesting is that Fanshawe himself wants the narrator to do these. Fanshawe thanks the narrator as he has done everything he wanted. In real life, it is not possible to witness such kind of events and this leads the reader to think. At the risk of causing you heart failure, I wanted to send you one last word-to thank you for what you have done. I knew that you were the person to ask, but things have turned out even better than I thought they would. You have gone beyond the possible, and I am in your debt. Sophie and the child will be taken care of, and because of that I can live with a clear conscience (p.280)

Like the other novellas of the trilogy, there are two characters that are doubles of each other in this story. The unnamed narrator and Fanshawe are very close friends. They look like each other not only physically but also personally. They are both writers, but, the only difference is that the unnamed narrator prefers to earn money from Fanshawe’s writings while Fanshawe does not. Fanshawe’s mother explains how these doubles look like each other; You even look like him, you know. You always did, the two of you-like brothers, almost like twins (...) I would sometimes confuse you from a distance. I couldn’t even tell which one of you was mine (p.308). Since the narrator was offered to fulfill the will of Fanshawe by Sophie, he finds himself surrounded by a chain of mysterious events as well as in a passionate relationship with her. The narrator experiences a change in his life just like the other characters in the previous novellas. In spite of the fact that Fanshawe and the unnamed narrator were very close friends when they were children, this friendship turned into hatred through the course of the story. The narrator even wants to kill Fanshawe and he reveals his negative feelings against him while he was having an unacceptable relationship with Fanshawe’s mother. This event shows the reader that Paul Auster uses such kind of absurdities wisely to reflect the enmity between these characters. Destruction of Fanshawe also gives harm to the narrator in spite of the fact that he wanted to kill him in the middle of the book. The relationship between Fanshawe and the narrator turns into hostility. Despite this, the dying of Fanshawe leads serious emotional disturbance on the narrator. This is typical of Auster to make the readers think about ambiguity. I no longer knew what to say. Fanshawe had used me up, and as I heard him breathing on the other side of the door, I felt as if the life were being sucked out of me (p.369). At the end of the story, Fanshawe most probably dies and leaves a notebook the content of which includes the life of his own. Fanshawe wanted the narrator to show this book to his son rather than his wife. Readers wonder why Fanshawe wanted his wife not to see this book. The narrator reads the notebook and threw it into the trash bin after tearing each pages one by one thinking that he gets rid of his best friend not only physically but also mentally for the rest of his life-time. The last novella, The Locked Room, is a detective story dealing with the relationship between the author and characters, that is to say, identity problem like the previous stories in New York Trilogy. 3. Conclusion Throughout the three novellas, characters and events seem to be connected to each other in one way or another. The reader often questions if the detective and the one being chased after can be interpreted each other’s mirror image. A reader of New York Trilogy cannot help feeling as if he is participating in the character’s search for meaning in the patchwork of pieces. However, he cannot avoid the inevitable conclusion that there is no final meaning and everything is possible, so it is meaningless to look for a meaning given by the author in a chaotic and fragmented world. As a consequence, it can be said that although the name of the stories are different from each other, they have quite common in terms of having double characters, their subject matter. To illustrate, Quinn and Auster in City of Glass, Blue and Black in Ghosts, Fanshawe and the unnamed narrator in the last book are the doubles of each other. Besides, the characters in the stories are in search of the truth and real- identity. In addition, readers cannot decide upon the sanity of the characters. There is no ending that is finalization, in each story and readers are forced to use their power of imagination to find out what happened to the protagonists at the end of the stories which is the clear characteristics of postmodernism....