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Analysis of City of glass by Paul Auster (1985)
Analyse af Tom Kristensen: Nat i Berlin 1921 (1927)
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Uddrag
Denne opgave omhandler en samlet analyse af en engelsk og dansk tekst, der afslutningsvis vil blive sammenlignet med hinanden i forhold til den litterære periode som teksterne stammer fra.
Det moderne gennembrud og den tilhørende industrialisering er hovedtiden, der vil præge opgavens udformning.
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This paper is a thorough analysis of the text City of glass that´s written by Paul Auster in 1985. He’s a popular and successful American author whose work has been translated into forty languages.
He’s mostly known for his exceptional way to mirror search for identity and personal meaning through literature.
City of glass is a very abstract novel. We get to meet a man named Quinn who’s an author living in New York. Although Quinn is a well-known author, his work, however, is published under the pseudonym, William Wilson.
This had allowed him to stay anonymous to his readers and continue to publish without any fuss or obligation to take responsibility for the outcome of the critic he might have faced with his intricate stories.
Quinn is a person who have lost his family. He was married and had a three-year-old child. After some time as he tried to continue living his life and overcome the loss of his family, his phone continuously started to ring during night for several days until he picked it up.
On the other end was a total stranger, who happened to believe Quinn was someone named Paul Auster. Although Quinn tried to explain that he wasn’t Paul, he finally gave in and agreed to meet him.
Throughout the novel we encounter the headperson, Quinn. He´s a guy that gives great thought to life and reflects a lot on his person.
He´s patient and conscious of his mental health as he enjoys taking long aimless walks through New York to forget and escape the tragic reality he’s been forced to live.
In other words, he subconsciously knows how to self-medicate after he had lost his wife and three-year-old son. Despite this, he appears to have a strong and admirable personality.
However, speaking of the specific characters in the novel, there is obviously a minor twist to Quinn. The pseudonym of his authorship, Will Wilson, and the character in his novel, Max Work, are a shadow of Quinn’ person.
He somehow manages to project his anger and grief from the loss of his family unto one of his mystery novels with Max Work as the main character through his pseudonym.
The perk of this is the fact that he can express himself freely without taking responsibility for the critic he could have faced if he hadn’t had a pseudonym.
The story mainly takes place in Quinn´s apartment and the streets of New York. We don’t get a detailed description of any of the places we happen to read about, however, I believe that they might have a symbolic meaning.
To purposely include New York in the story is associated with liberation, crowdedness and most importantly dreams.
I believe that the symbolic meaning of these three factors derive from what the author is trying to say indirectly about the main character, Quinn. While reading part of the novel I stumbled upon these few lines “on his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere.
And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again.”1 Quinn wishes liberation from grief and sorrow after experiencing the death of his family which he finds in New York.
The symbolic meaning of crowdedness, on the other hand, is Quinn´ way of expressing his will to be lost and feel free.
Finally, the symbolic meaning of dreams, and why I have associated it with New York goes back to a saying that goes:
“People go to LA to “find themselves”, they come to New York to become someone new”.2 It can be difficult to change oneself without changing the surroundings, therefore instead of leaving it as a dream, they should go to New York.
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