Paul Auster, Chapter 1 from City of Glass


1. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator says that "the question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell." What does he mean by those two statements? How might they be connected to his later explanation of how the reading process works, particularly his assertion that "the center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end"?

2. "William Wilson," the name that the narrator has chosen as his pseudonym, is also the pseudonym chosen by the protagonist of a story by Edgar Allan Poe, who is often credited with the invention of the detective story in America. In the Poe story, the protagonist is haunted by a doppelgänger who uses the same name and who pursues him relentlessly. In what ways is this name, then, an appropriate one for Auster’s narrator? What is the relationship between the "triad of selves that Quinn had become" and Auster’s use of his own name for the detective whom the mysterious caller is trying to reach? Why does Quinn answer to the name?

3. How does Auster’s protagonist resemble the hard-boiled detectives of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Dashiell Hammett’s nameless "Continental Op" and Sam Spade, and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe? In what other ways is Auster making use of the conventions of the hard-boiled detective novel and film noir in this excerpt?