Being In The City: A Postmodern Reading Of Paul Auster’S City Of Glass

Paul Auster’s "City of Glass" (1985) has been widely described as a postmodern detective novella. The work has provoked debate about the postmodern literary devices such as metafiction, fictional worlds, and the economics of language and signified meanings. My reading on postmodernism in "City of Glass" focuses on how the novella departs from modernism, particularly within the urban setting of New York as a depersonalizing site of dominant capitalist signs. Simmel (1971) famously said that the city dweller develops a "protective organ" in the metropolitan environment, which was also echoed by his student Benjamin (1968). I will emphasize that while the protagonist Daniel Quinn does not exhibit Simmel’s blase attitude, he constructs a sense of self or Being in the context of the city in opposition to a criminal other. Auster draws particular focus on the dyadic relationship through the figures of the investigator and criminal that is comparable to a Sartrean notion of the other, essentially characterized by conflict and a will to appropriate/exterminate the other. "City of Glass" raises interesting implications for how Being is constructed amid the plethora of urban stimuli and crowds within a postmodern framework. “The other is of interest to me only to the extent that he is another Me, a Me-object for Me, and conversely to the extent that he reflects my Me" (Sartre, 1956).