New York Trilogy Essay

Essay: THE NEW YORK TRILOGY by Paul Auster




Q. It has been claimed that “City of Glass”, “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room” are all the same story. Discuss this view in the light of their titles and the title The New York Trilogy. Use examples to illustrate your point.

The New York Trilogy has probably been entitled that way because the three stories take place in New York City.The word “trilogy” brings the stories together because they are different stories with different characters, but their themes are shared, which means that in essence it is one story in three different disguises, three plots to support the writer’s same idea.
The titles of the three stories are perfect for them because they can be easily related to each story, but at the same time, as City of Glasscan be an appropriate title for that tale, either The Locked Room or Ghosts could be entitled that way, too. This is because the titles also convey the themes of the stories.
In City of Glass the word “glass” can have many meanings. Glass is a means to admire things in another dimension; we can see inside a locked room through a glass window, for example. Glass is tricky: it allows us to thinkwe can touch what is inside, but in actual fact we cannot. This is very important because in this book nothing is what it seems to be.
Glass can also be a mirror in which we can see ourselves, we can see what we are like. But mirrors cannot show everything: we cannot entirely know ourselves, or anybody for that matter. City of Glass is very thought-provoking; it makes us think aboutourselves and about the nature of man.
Mirrors show us what we are like by showing the image of two people that look exactly the same, they appear to be doubles, which is another theme in the stories that make up The New York Trilogy: the exchange of personalities. The characters discover the mistakes they made in the past, their nature and intentions after the appearance of a double. But doubles canalso show us the two sides of a person: our triumphant side and our pathetic one, "Mr. Happy" and "Mr. Sad" in City of Glass, and the two Peter Stillmans Sr that Quinn sees at the train station. City of Glass portrays a city in which you think you can see everything, but where nothing is what it seems to be: in fact, everything often is a mere reflection of something else.
In this story, Quinn,the main character, ends up locked inside a room. But the locked room is himself: he keeps inside very painful memories about his wife and son, and he cannot continue living unless he lets go of that past. It is as if he had died with them, because he is living as a ghost, a hidden writer, an absent citizen, with no friends or relatives.
The room into which Peter Stillman, both father and sonare locked is permanent. Peter Stillman Senior has locked himself up inside a room of language and Biblical stories, and he cannot get out because he has driven himself mad. Neither character can get out of their locked rooms. Peter Stillman wasted his life and ruined his son’s with his obsession: he took his son’s life (and his own, at the end of the story) by turning him into a ghost. Thecharacters go through a death of ideas, by becoming obsessed with one idea.
The title Ghosts is also very tricky. A ghost is someone we usually cannot see, someone who is somewhere between life and death. Quinn becomes a ghost, Fanshawe is a ghost, White is also a ghost, Blue ends up as a ghost, and so on. Writers are described as ghosts; at the end of the story they are gone, we never see their facesin it but yet we feel them close to us in each word. This plays with another theme in the trilogy: what is a writer; who is really the writer of the story; who is the writer; and who is the reader?
“There are ghosts all around us,” says Black (page 207), and the writer is a ghost haunting all the characters and taking note of each of their moves. The presence of the writer himself gives the...