As the novels progresses, Quinn takes on a number of other identities. And Quinn's interior dialogue with Work and Wilson is just the beginning. Rather, he saw personal identity as defined by a process of on-going, ever changing dialogue with oneself and others. In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise." - Michel Foucault completely rejected the idea that a person has one fixed inner self or essence serving them as their individual personal identity. Whereas William Wilson remained an abstract figure for him Work had increasingly come to life. We read, "Over the years, Work had become very close to Quinn. On the first pages of the novel, the narrator conveys mystery writer Quinn's reflections on William Wilson, his literary pseudonym and Max Work, the detective in his novels. By way of example, here are three quotes from the novel coupled with key concepts from the postmodern tradition along with my brief commentary.
I found the story and writing as compelling as Chandler's The Big Sleep or Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and as thought-provoking as reading an essay by Foucault or Barthes. “Auster harnesses the inquiring spirit any reader brings to a mystery, redirecting it from the grubby search for a wrongdoer to the more rarified search for self.Paul Auster's City of Glass reads like Raymond Chandler on Derrida, that is, a hard-boiled detective novel seasoned with a healthy dose of postmodernist themes, a novel about main character Daniel Quinn as he walks the streets of uptown New York City. “It’s as if Kafka had gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version.” – The Washington Post “Exhilarating.a brilliant investigation of the storyteller’s art guided by a writer who’s never satisfied with just the facts.” “Eminently readable and mysterious.Auster has added some new dimensions to modern literature, and – more importantly even – to our perspectives on our planet.” Auster’s obsessions with identity, language, ambiguity and defeat are revealed on the long, tailing walks through the metropolis that give his labyrinthine novels their switchback shape, and New York looms throughout like a modern-day Babel.” “The plots twist, the dialogue snaps and the humor stings.
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