Monday, April 28, 2008
Identity in City of Glass
One of the definining characteristics of City of Glass is the way it engages "identity games": it questions our basic assumptions about the singular, static "self" who goes around in the world with a secure, consistent "personality." These "identity games" in the novel often have to do with authorship, language, word-play and temporal and spatial mobility. Please find a short passage (a sentence or two, at most a paragraph) in your reading so far where such "identity games" are exemplified and record the passage as a COMMENT to this post. Don't forget to include the page number. We can then use our collection of passages to examine "identity" in class tomorrow...
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22 comments:
“In the triad of selves 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. If Wilson was an illusion, he nevertheless justified the lives of the other two. If Wilson didn’t exist, he was nevertheless the bridge that allowed Quinn to pass himself into Work. And little by little, Work had become a presence in Quinn’s life, his interior brother, his comrade solitude.”
This deals with the main characters various identities he has with himself.
-Posted by Sebastian
"...as time wore on he found himself doing a good imitation of a man preparing to go out. He cleared the table of the breakfast dishes, tossed the newspaper on the couch, went into the bedroom, showered, shaved, went on to the bedroom wrapped in two towels, opened the closet, and picked out his clothes for the day. He found himself tending toward a jacket and tie... He dismissed a white shirt as too formal, however, and instead chose a gray and red check affair to go with the gray tie. He put them on in a kind of trance." (pg 22). Quinn is definitely dealing with some sort of "identity game" as he pretends to play the role of Paul Auster.
-Ly
"And then, most important of all: to remember who I am. To remember who I am supposed to be. I do not think this is a game. On the other hand, nothing is clear. For example: who are you? And if you think you know, why do you keep lying about it? I have no answer. All I can say is this: listen to me. My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name" (Auster 66). As Daniel Quinn writes in his own private notebook, it is evidenced that he is fighting some major identity crisis. How can he claim his name is Paul Auster only to claim in his next sentence that isn't his name? Quinn wants to remember who he is, but appears to not quite be able to do so.
"He was warming up now. Something told him that he had captured the right tone, and a sudden sense of pleasure surged through him, as though he had just managed to cross some internal border within himself." (Auster, 41) In this passage it is evident that Quinn is dealing with personal identity issues as he finds new ways to reinvent himself.
"To guard against this mishap he devised several different methods of deceleration. The first was to tell himself that he was no longer Daniel Quinn. He was Paul Auster now, and with each step he took he tried to fit more comfortably into the strictures of that transformation" (Auster 98). He we see another example of Quinn dealing with "identity games" as Auster.
"The detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through this 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 detective are interchangeable" (15).
This passage questions the reader's perspective on the identity of the author. It forces the reader to ask, is Paul Auster the author and detective in City of Glass? Even more fascinating is the way Auster uses his own name for the supposed detective Quinn is impersonating.
"Before he had a chance to absorb the woman's presence, to describe her to himself and form his impressions, she was talking to him, forcing him to respond. Therefor, even in those first moments, he had lost ground, he had started to fall behind himself." (page 23)
I thought this passage was an obvious choice for this prompt in the sense that there were paragraphs explaining his personalities. Rather this passage was an indirect way of showing that Quinn was not in touch with his whole self. Here is shows that there is more than one self in Quinns head trying to work together in order to even process a sitiuation.
"'For thirteen years the father was away. His name is Peter Stillman too. Strange, is it not? That two people can have the same name? I do not know if that is his real name. But I do not think he is me. We are both Peter Stillman. But Peter Stillman is not my real name. So perhaps I am not Peter Stillman, after all.'"
- p. 31
"'For now, I am still Peter Stillman. That is not my real name. I cannot say who I will be tomorrow. Each day is new, and each day I am born again. I see hope everywhere, even in the dark, and when I die I will perhaps become God' (Auster 36)."
"As the car rattled through the park toward the West Side, Quinn looked out the window and wondered if these were the same trees that Peter Stillman saw when he walked out into the air and the light. He wondered if Peter saw the same things he did, or whether the world was a different place for him. And if a tree was not a tree, he wondered what it really was."
This passage doesn't directly deal with Quinn's search for his own identity, but instead with Quinn's question of his own identity in relation to others and also identity in the world.
"He was about to tell her who her was, but then he realized that it made no difference. The girl was beyond hope. For five years he had kept William Wilson's identity a secret, and he wasn't about to give it away now, least of all to an imbecile stranger"(Auster, 86).
There's something about the train stations that bring strangers together in the same space for a short amount of time. They come and go. People don't bother to tell their names to each other anymore..there's a sense of anonymity that's strongly associated with public spaces.
"Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter "i," standing for "investigator," it was "I" in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him." This passage introduces the theme of the triple, a step further the more visited ego-alter ego pattern. Further, it recalls Freud's triad of the self.
"New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to konw its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well." (8)
Even in the first couple passages of the book, it is evident Quinn is dealing with something deeper within himself.
"A part of him had died, he told his friends, and he did not want it coming back to haunt him. It was then that he had taken on the name of William Wilson. . . .although in many ways Quinn continued to exist, he no longer existed for anyone but himself." (10)
"Quinn remembered visiting Nantucket with his wife long ago, in her first month of pregnancy, when his son was no more than a tiny almond in her belly. He found it painful to think of that now, and he tried to suppress the pictures that were forming in his head. "Look at it through Auster's eyes,' he said to himself, 'and dont think of anything else.'"
Page 83.
"He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him-as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life"(11) Quinn has clearly lost touch with himself. He no longer has a sense of who he is, because it seems to him that the Quinn he used to be is long gone.
when Quinn meets the man in riverside park:
"...'Thats true, but im not in the habit of talking to strangers...aren't you interested in knowing why?' (quinn says "I'm afraid not")..."Well put. I can see you're a man of sense. I think we're going to get along. Its just that I prefer not to speak to anyone who does not give me his name." (Quinn: "But then he's no longer a stranger") "
This conversation brings forth the idea of identity belonging to a name or a name serving as one's identity. The man wouldn't talk to a stranger, which he saw as someone who's name he didn't know.
"Now, my question is this. What happens when a thing no longer preforms its function? Is it still the thing, or has it become something else? When you rip off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella? You open the spokes, put them over your head, walk out into the rain, and you get grenched. Is it possible to go on calling this object an umbrella? In general, people do. At the very limimt, they willl say the umbrella is broken. To me this is a serious error, the source of all our troubles. Because it can no longer preform its function, the umbrella has ceased to be an umbrella. It might resemble an umbrella, it might once have been an umbrella, but now it has chnaged into something else. The word, however, has remained the same." (122)
Has Quinn changed? Does he still preform the function of Quinn? Or Auster?
"He took out the photograph from his pocket and studied it again, paying special attention to the eyes. He remembered having read somewhere that the eyes were the one feature of the face that never changed. From childhood to old age they remained the same, and a man with the head to see it could theoretically look into the eyers of a boy in a photograph and recognize the same person as an old man."-p.87
It is interesting to see that Quinn is looking to identify someone in simply by the way their eyes look. It shows how simple a identity can be.
Anita
"Directly behind Stillman, heaving into view just inches behind his right man shoulder, another man stopped, took a lighter out of his pocket, and lit a cigarette. His face was the exact twin of Stillman's." The appearance of two Stillmans Sr. provides yet another question of identity. The entire time he's watching the first Stillman, I couldn't help but wonder about the second, but he's scarcely mentioned again.
In the beginning of the novel, "identity games" are immediately present with the protagonist Quinn, and his mystery novelist alter ego William Wilson. The story explains:
"William Wilson, after all, was an invention, and even though he had been born within Quinn himself, he now led an independent life. Quinn treated him with deference, at times even admiration, but he never went so far as to believe that he and William Wilson were the same man" (pgs. 9-10, City of Glass, Paul Auster).
Apparently William Wilson is different enough from his creator that Quinn regards him as a separate entity, not part of him. Quinn's William Wilson is the first sign of "identity games" in the novel, but for Quinn, things only continue to get more complicated, as he later assumes the identity of Paul Auster the detective, further fragmenting his character and identity.
- Charles Horsfall
(Even though this reply is way past due, I say better late than never)
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