With his novel City of Glass, Paul Auster (“Big Paul”) set out to write a postmodern novel that utilized the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel.  Many individuals would say that he succeeded brilliantly in this task; those individuals would be correct.  This claim, however, begs the question: “how can one accurately define a novel as being ‘postmodern’ when that very term is a highly subjective can of worms?”  Quite simple: by limiting the scope of discussion about postmodernism to the concerns of identity.
   
In this particular case, McHale’s article “From Modernist to Postmodernist Fiction” serves as the keystone upon which to build the argument.  In this work, he states that “the dominant” (the focal theme which unites all components within postmodernism) is ontological.  In other words, he finds postmodernism to be concerned more with questioning how we become who we are, what contributes to our developing personalities and, more importantly, how we can ever be certain of the stability of our personalities and memories; in short he questions how we establish and maintain our identities.  Quite obviously, identity is the dominant focus of the meta-fictional novel City of Glass.  It is through Daniel Quinn’s amorphous identity that Big Paul cements his novel in the realm of the postmodern.  Yet, Big Paul is able to unify this fractured and disparate sense of Daniel Quinn’s identity all within one central figure: that of the son.
   
From the start we learn that Quinn’s identity is a mass of unintelligible fragmentation.  As identity is defined by one contrasting the similarities and differences inherent to their own personalities against those of others, it should come as no surprise that the confusion of Quinn’s identity is dependant upon the identities of other personalities around him.  Throughout the course of the book, Quinn either wears, can be associated with, or is emphasized by all of the following identities:  Daniel Auster, Detective Auster, William Wilson, Max Work, Peter Stillman and last, but not least, Don Quixote.  These diverse and varied sets of “identity masks” only serve to confuse both Quinn and the reader as to his true nature, and ultimately are what lead to his dissolving sense of self.
   
Our first view into Quinn’s split persona occurs at the beginning of the text when his livelihood and duality as William Wilson are related to the reader.  We are told that,
To Quinn he and Wilson are entirely different entities.  They may share the same physical space in any given instant, but neither shares the same temporal nor cognitive space within the man’s physical shell.  The disparity of personality is present and recognized, and Quinn sees in himself a fragmented man.  This is also where we get our first glimpse of the fact that whenever Quinn assumes a new identity, it is always one that occupies the role of son. Though fictitious, William Wilson is born of Quinn’s mind; without Quinn, William Wilson would not “live.”  Even then we see that when Quinn thinks he has clearly separated both identities into seamless and different compartments, such a belief proves to be inaccurate. 

When Quinn is waiting at the train station and encounters the woman reading the Max Work novel, his internal reaction to her criticism is to find the experience, “…painful, and he struggled desperately to swallow his pride,” and finds himself wanting to “punch the girl in the face…” (87).  Clearly the separation between William Wilson and Quinn isn’t as complete or as total as we had been led to believe earlier on.  Thus, even the recognized fragmentation of identity becomes suspect, and the certainty that Quinn once possessed about exactly how he existed as different people becomes suspect.  The chaos of his mind is so disorderly that what was once thought to be an identity fragmented on one front shows itself to be more unified than previously thought.  Through this action, Big Paul adheres to the notion that an ever-shifting and multiply layered identity is central to postmodernism, while simultaneously revitalizing and invigorating the notion.  It is as if he states, “identity is never a certain or stable feature, and the greatest instability occurs when one thinks they’ve recognized that inherent uncertainty of their persona.”  Through beautifully weaving the sense of a stable and unstable sense of identity into one, Big Paul truly hits upon something so far beyond disorder and chaos, that it can only be described as entropic.  The idea that Quinn assumes the role of son in all of his guises is an example of how one can find a singular unifying element to create this paradoxical sense of “stable instability.”
   
By carefully examining each incident of Quinn taking on a new identity as his own, one quickly finds the emerging pattern where Quinn thrusts himself into the role of being a son.  The first and most obvious parental relationship is that which all fictional characters share: they are children of the author who wrote them, and in Quinn’s case he is the creation of Big Paul (the living, breathing man) and any life that he possesses is the result of the writer.  Big Paul also transgresses the author/character relationship later on and solidifies his role as a parental figure to Quinn in the form of the invisible hand that mysteriously brings food to Quinn in Peter and Virginia Stillman’s apartment in the way that a loving father seeks to take care of his starving son.  As Quinn’s very identity as a character in a novel is called into question the reader’s faith in a clear and distinct division between the “real” world and the literary one is, thus, shaken reaffirming the novel’s postmodern focus.
   
When Quinn interviews Professor Stillman, he uses the identities of Henry Dark and Peter Stillman respectively in his last two visits.  Just as Peter Stillman is the physical and literal son of Professor Stillman, so too does Henry Dark share the exact same father-son relationship with the professor that Quinn shares with Big Paul: that of creator and creation.  Ironically, the creator-creation relationship is exactly the same connection that binds Professor Stillman with the biological Peter Stillman.  Just as the professor needed to “protect [himself]” (125) by creating Henry Dark as a fictitious source for his studies, so did he protect himself by creating Peter to be the receptacle of God’s language; a “language” that once learned has dire consequences for the individual’s mental state (as demonstrated by Peter and the professor who eventually created it himself because of lacking his son.)  The relationship between the Stillmans is thus cemented in the meta-narrative, and Peter begins looking less and less like the son of Professor Stillman and more like a character flowing from the elder Stillman’s thoughts.
   
Quinn’s duality between his own identity and that of a son figure is nowhere more clearly expressed than when he meets Paul Auster’s son, Daniel.  As noted by Paul Auster, the two share the same first name, and the association between them is cemented as Daniel Auster bids farewell to Quinn by saying, “Good-bye myself!” (158).  By drawing the reader’s attention to the relationship between Quinn and Paul Auster, one is forced to come back to the relationship that exists between Quinn and Big Paul, once again blurring the lines between the identities of creator and creation, and moving both men onto the same realm where Quinn can be both the creation of Big Paul and an individual that exists in his own right.
   
Complicating everything is the fact that Quinn also serves as a father figure when it comes to William Wilson and Max Work.  However, an important fact to remember about Quinn is that “If he lived now in the world at all, it was only at one remove, through the imaginary person of Max Work” (16).  This association with Max Work eventually leads to becoming Work through the guise of Detective Auster, and Quinn becomes his own son, proving that even within the jumbled mess of relationships, one can’t even find solace in the constant of Quinn only being a son.  Thus, identity is forced to the forefront of the story, making the reader face the fact of the importance placed upon it; an importance that is echoed within this text, and reaffirms its place as being postmodern.
   
Why does Big Paul focus so much on the role of father and son?  As one can expect, there is a certain meaning lurking behind every father/son parallel in this book.  As a result of the heavy influence of Christianity, western civilization finds no relating set of identities to be more fundamental than that of “father” and “son.”  When any such human concepts become canonized into the realm of fundamentalism, they also inherently pick up the baggage of being seen as static, archetypical, and unchanging.  Simply put, there is nothing more solid and unquestionable in the minds of most people than the relationship which exists between a single father and his son.  There is a certain hierarchy to it, and the son must obey the father.  To focus on how this relationship can be twisted and changed in new ways forces a reader to see that one cannot simply refer to themselves as “son” when defining their identity and expect it to have unalterable and universal meaning.
   
In order to disrupt this static ideal, Big Paul asks, “But wasn’t a father once a son himself?  Can’t he very well become a son again?  Can’t he have multiple fathers?  Can he be a father to himself?”  The questions are rhetorical, arising only due to the pre-existing answers that the text grants us.  We are forced to look at the father/son relationship, to realize that there is much more to either identity than commonly thought.  This opens up various avenues for exploration of identities.  If there’s much more to what many consider a fundamental pair of identities, what else can be found existing within other familiar ones?

Copyright 2003.  Essay used with author's permission.
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