“City of Glass” by Paul Auster (post 3): Is the beginning metafiction, postmodernism, or the magical inner world of a writer with multiple personality?

The first novel of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy begins as the story of a man with multiple personality, which is explicitly described, but unlabeled and unacknowledged as such.

The protagonist, a Mr. Quinn, is described as a “triad of selves” (1, p. 6): 1. Quinn, a writer; 2. William Wilson, the pseudonymous author of Quinn’s detective novels; and 3. Max Work, Wilson’s private-eye narrator. (“William Wilson” was the title character of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous multiple personality story.)

“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…[Quinn] had, of course, long ago stopped thinking of himself as real. If he lived now in the world at all, it was only at one remove, through the imaginary person of Max Work. His detective necessarily had to be real” (1, pp. 6-9).

At this point, Quinn gets a telephone call from someone asking to speak to “Paul Auster. Of the Auster Detective Agency” (1, p. 7). Quinn decides to pretend that he is Paul Auster and meet with the caller, who hires Quinn to protect a young adult, Peter Stillman, from his father, who had kept Peter in a dark room for most of his early childhood. The father, after thirteen years hospitalization or imprisonment, is about to be set free and return to New York.

So far, the only way I can make sense of this story is to think of all the characters as the alternate personalities of one person. What critics refer to as metafiction or postmodernism seems to me like the creative, magical, inner world of a writer with multiple personality.

1. Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy: City of Glass [1985], Ghosts, The Locked Room. New York, Penguin Books, 2006.