The Poetics of Identity in Paul Auster’s City of Glass: The Postmodern Reading

The Poetics of Identity in Paul Auster’s City of Glass: The Postmodern Reading

The City of Glass by Paul Auster is a very well-known example of metafiction with its several layers of reality and identity. Even Paul Auster’s himself is a character as a writer who writes an article about the different identities of a book. Besides, the protagonist Quinn writes a detective novel that he was also a character. Readers will be impressed by the very first sight of the first the chapter that the writer Paul Auster and the narrator decide to look for Quinn in Stillman’s networks of identity in the city. The reason for choosing City of Glass is due to the characteristic traits and themes of the Postmodernity. The author, Paul Auster seems to us as a good choice to portray these postmodernist issues and demonstrate how these manifests themselves in textual contexts, for example by using the main character, Quinn as an actor to deconstruct the genre of classical mystery novels.