“City of Glass” by Paul Auster (post 4): The theme—that not only writers, but possibly everyone, has multiple personality—is an exaggeration.

There are no real people in this novel, only alternate personalities, who don’t live and die, but instead, come and go: come out where they can be seen and go back inside where they can’t be seen, as alternate personalities do.

The prime example, the protagonist, Daniel Quinn, is described (see previous post) as the least real (in the sense of being out and active in the world) of a triad of personalities, which consists of Quinn, a writer, his pseudonym (William Wilson), and Wilson’s fictional detective. At the end of the novel, since Quinn is not a real person, his disappearance does not need to be accounted for—he is not hospitalized; there is no dead body; he just ceases to be out in the world where he can be seen.

Paul Auster, himself, is depicted, by name, as just another character in this novel. And if the protagonist, the most important character, is more like an alternate personality than like a real person, then certainly a less important character like Paul Auster must be an alternate personality, too.

And since both of its writer characters, Daniel Quinn and Paul Auster, are alternate personalities, one theme of this novel is that writers have multiple personality.

Indeed, since all the characters in this novel may be alternate personalities, the theme may be that all people have multiple personality. As one character says:

“…people change, don’t they? One minute we’re one thing, and then another another” (1, p. 83).

However, I think it is an exaggeration to say that everyone has multiple personality. When writers imply that that is the case, they are overgeneralizing from their own personal experience.

Also, I am not saying that Paul Auster intended the precise theme about multiple personality that I have ascribed to his novel. He probably intended to tell an intriguing story about reality and identity, which he succeeded in doing. As the novel says in its opening paragraph:

“Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance…The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell” (1, p. 3).

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