INVESTIGATING THE MALLEABILITY OF IDENTITY AND

NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE IN

PAUL AUSTER�S

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY

�

***

The three novels that outline Paul Auster�s The New York Trilogy (NYT) first came out separately, with City of Glass being published by Sun & Moon Press in 1985 followed by Ghosts and The Locked Room in 1986. Finally, in 1987, Faber and Faber published the novels as a trilogy, and it is in this form that the novels subsequently have become widely and justly renowned. In total, Paul Auster is the author of ten novels, the first being the memoir, The Invention of Solitude, from 1982. His most recent novel, The Book of Illusions, came out in 2002 and he is now writing on his next book, which for the time being bears the work title, Oracle Night. Originally, Paul Auster started out humbly as a poet, reviewer and translator before finally making a name as a novelist. Hence, during the 1970s, he industriously published several works of his own poetry, while also translating the poetry collections of several distinguished French poets into English.

As the premise of this thesis, I have decided to deal with the two fundamental themes of identity and narration, and furthermore to consider the contextual themes of intertextuality, ambiguity and nothingness. Accormdingly, I have chosen to subdivide them into four related topic areas in order to examine these central themes as closely as possible, which then will be elaborated further on in the supplementary sections, so that I eventually may arrive at a rewarding conclusion.. Since NYT is so wide in scope and thematically rich as it is, the two core themes of identity and narrative perspective, had to be settled on at the expense of other equally appropriate themes. Consequently, there are a number of topics that I will not consider in my thesis. Among these are the topics of language theory, deconstruction and postmodernism. Also, when it comes to the trilogy�s stylistic challenge to the detective genre, which has been extensively discussed among scholars, I will only go into this briefly in section 4.1. Moreover, I will also have to leave out an evaluation on the biblical theme, however interesting it is. Lastly, I will ignore the widespread speculations about the autobiographical elements detectable in NYT, as I believe them to be both irrelevant and space consuming in this specific context.

As has been stated above, the novels that make up The New York Trilogy were first published as individual books, and could therefore be treated as distinctive pieces of fiction, which they often have been among literary scholars. However, in the course of my thesis, I mean to consider them as three closely related stories, as I find that each story essentially supplement the other within the trilogy�s poly-vocal turbulence. Concisely, I mean to examine the stories on an individual as well as a collective level, but before I move on to starting the actual analysis, I will just briefly sum up the principal concerns of this thesis: First of all, the title of my thesis being "Investigating the Malleability of Identity and Narrative Perspective", my aim is to reveal some of the mechanisms that are at play in forming and not the least fragmenting characters� notion of identity. Secondly, there seems to be a suggestive struggle going on between the narrator and the narrated, which is further embedded in an intricate network of intertextual voices. Thus, in the end these main points will at last lead me to reflect on the occurrence of ambiguity, and in this connection also to evaluate my suggestion that the trilogy in a way could be said to approach the theme of nothingness.

�

What first and foremost connects the trilogy�s main characters, Quinn of City of Glass, Blue of Ghosts and the unnamed narrator in The Locked Room is a pronounced susceptibility to external influences, which gradually erases their private notions of self. Thus, influenced by polarized moods of emotional frustration on the one hand and hunger for detective outgoingness on the other, the character Daniel Quinn, upon receiving a misplaced phone call, eagerly plunges himself into a seemingly authentic case. A similar thing goes for Blue, who by White is lured into a supposedly simple job of shadowing a man known as Black. But the job has the effect of charging Blue with contesting feelings of confinement and freedom in the midst of a growing self-alienation. Conversely, in The Locked Room, it is the very absence of the character Fanshawe that for a long time dictates the actions of his unnamed friend up until one critical point, where he finally seizes authority over his own life.

To let Daniel Quinn enter the scene first, one notices how immediately the identity- diffuseness in his life is established. Already on page 4 Quinn�s writer pseudonym William Wilson is introduced as not only having "been born within Quinn himself", but as someone who "now led an independent life". However, Quinn firmly explains that he does not equate himself and William Wilson for the obvious reason that "William Wilson, after all, [is] an invention" . Still, Wilson seems to serve a rather significant purpose in that he "justifie[s] the lives of the other two" , these being Quinn and the main hero of his novels, Max Work. Quinn describes Max Work as having "increasingly come to life" , as well as being a detective who "necessarily had to be real" . This is owed to the fact that Quinn no more is "thinking of himself as real" , but finds comfort in "pretend[ing] to be Work�even if only in his mind" . Subsequently, Quinn embraces yet another identity as Paul Auster who is supposedly a real detective, an action that soon fills him with a sense of having "lost ground" and makes him "fall behind himself" . However, Quinn tries to retain a sense of order when he, before his appointment with Peter Stillman, stresses that it is not "his appointment [but] Paul Auster�s" . The fact that Quinn�s assortment of identities is extensive is further demonstrated in the words he uses before entering the Stillman apartment, for here he declares, "I must keep my eyes open" , with "eyes" ironically punning " I ",or, many " Is ". However, by the end of that day, when Quinn submits his first written meditations on the case, he states that it is crucial "to remember who I am... [t]o remember who I am supposed to be" . In deed, this self-contradicting sentence illustrates just how decisively Quinn has disrupted his sense of self. From now on this notion of irresolution will be repeatedly hinted at.

On page 50, Quinn again has to "[remind] himself of who he [is] supposed to be" and this renders him in a condition of mental blankness, as "he feels as though he had somehow been taken out of himself" . Still, Quinn feels convinced that he has not yet "lost himself", due to the fact that he is "merely pretending" . However, when Quinn later walks into Grand Central Station to find Stillman Sr, he does so "as if inside the body of Paul Auster". In fact, by also obscuring the physical borders between his identity and that of Paul Auster, Quinn actively steps beside himself to begin a new existence in limbo.

With his four identities (i.e. Quinn, William Wilson, Max Work and Paul Auster), Quinn symbolises a veritable overrepresentation of characters . That each identity is serving an isolated purpose is clearly demonstrated when Quinn on page 6 pronounces Wilson "ventriloquist" and himself a "dummy", whereas Work is "his interior brother, his comrade in solitude". But Quinn, upon facing the erotic apperance of Virginia Stillman, seems to forget this �arrangement�. Hence, when he later realizes that Virginia�s sexual advances will not lead to anything, Quinn admits to having been "misguided in his hopes" due to the fact that he had "momentarily confus[ed] himself with Max Work" . Quinn�s mounting disillusionment reaches a peak when he, while awaiting Stillman Sr�s arrival, sees a woman reading Suicide Squeeze, the first book written by his �author-self� William Wilson, and misleadingly refers to her as "one of his readers" (i.e. Quinn�s). Although he tells himself that he can always "return to being Quinn" , his contradictive adding up of non-existing identities inevitably refutes this theory, as he has now become as illusory as them, a mere echo of his former self . Analogous to this is the situation that Blue of Ghosts ends up in, where Black�s presence controls as well as confirms that of Blue, and thus in fact makes him more aware of himself to such an extend that Blue "for the first time in his life [feels] he has been thrown back on himself, with nothing to grab hold of" . Like Quinn, there are several moments when Blue feels so close to Black that he must remind himself of their separateness. One example of this can be found on page 147, where Blue on catching himself in the act of imagining Black�s real story declares, "This isn�t the story of my life, after all, � I�m supposed to be writing about him, not myself". Nonetheless, it is later revealed that "the only way for Blue to have a sense of what is happening is to be inside Black�s mind" . Paradoxically, it is also in such moments of extreme closeness that Blue, like Quinn, is reassured that he can go back to leading "the semblance of an independent life" at any time. Blue remains all the time attentive to the inevitable constraints connected with working solo, "After all", he says, "[one] can�t watch someone twenty-four hours a day" - except, of course, oneself. Yet, the more Blue adapts his life to that of Black�s, the more Blue feels estranged from Black and on page 170 Blue arrives at the conclusion that it "is not possible for a man as Black to exist". This is further paraphrased near the end of the novel, when Blue says that he "at this point can no longer accept Black�s existence, and therefore�denies it" . But by denouncing Black�s existence, Blue necessarily denounces his own, however, he also feels that by watching Black "he is also watching himself". Pace has described this symmetry of existence that here is seen between Blue and Black as exemplifying "two mirrors facing each other, holding nothing but a small artificial space, but creating the illusion of infinity" .

One thing that connects all three character in the trilogy is the fact that they all share a preliminary faith in their own independence which, when proved illusory, hurls them into an insufferable condition of existential trepidation. Alford elaborates on this issue when he argues that "[t]he characters and narrators of these stories respond to their evolving insight into the �nature� of their selves with fear, violence and despair" . As in the cases of Quinn and Blue, the Narrator of The Locked Room devotes his life to the unravelling of another character�s life. However, this case differs from the others, though, in that Fanshawe unlike old Stillman and Black, may be considered a physical non-character.

What is paradoxical about the last novel is that the Narrator is caught in a chain of events governed by an absent character. While Quinn and Blue come gradually closer to their objects, the narrator�s sense of identity is contingent on that of Fanshawe�s from the start, the Narrator describing him as "the place where everything begins � without him I would hardly know who I am" . The fusion between him and Fanshawe is firmly established on page 231, when the Narrator looks back and confesses: "[T]he more fully I disappeared into my ambitions for Fanshawe, the more sharply I came into focus for myself". This culminates by the end, when the Narrator realises that his pursuing Fanshawe as a separate being "�had been wrong. Fanshawe was exactly where I was, and he has been there since the beginning" . Unlike Blue, the Narrator does not go as far as to violently attack his impostor, for even though he shows many signs of the fear and despair Alford referred to, he integrates Fanshawe�s existence into his own "as the thought of [his] own death" , and in so doing he in fact evolves into a more fulfilled and complete character than both Quinn and Blue, whose identities and notions of self remain compliant to outer control throughout.

�

The various changes of identity that the characters go through are closely linked with their taking new names. Time and again, names are assumed or discarded by one character, only to be re-adopted by another character at a later point. This eventually has the effect of creating not only "complexity, but outright contradiction", as Alford puts it . To start out with Daniel Quinn again, his �noms de plume� are, as earlier mentioned, those of William Wilson and Max Work. Significantly, "William Wilson" is also the title of an Edgar Allan Poe story about man who kills his doppelganger. Furthermore, the blowhard personality of Wilson�s hero is quite literally a big [max] job [work] for Quinn , because it leads to Quinn�s "feeling somewhat exhausted by his efforts" . Also, Quinn shares his initials with Don Quixote, the anti-hero of Miguel de Cervantes� novel whose spirit can be seen as pervading City of Glass. On page 74, old Stillman intriguingly notes that the name Quinn among others rhymes with "twin" as well as with "kin". What makes this particularly interesting is the fact that "twin" semantically means �two of a kind�, while "kin" means �of same blood�. Thus, only ten pages later, Quinn pretends to be Peter Stillman, son of Peter Stillman and in that way he not only twins young Stillman, but indirectly associates himself with old Stillman as if being of same blood as him.

I have so far distinguished between the Stillmans� as young and old Stillman for the sake of simplicity, but the novel never does so and that could suggest that young Stillman from the very beginning is only a product of Quinn�s imagination. This suspicion is supported by Quinn�s first impression of young Stillman as an embodiment of whiteness, as " almost transparent" so that it seems "as though he [is] not there" . Young Stilllman in deed seems to posses the charisma of a �still man� and on page 37 in Barrone et al, Stillman is lucidly portrayed as a man "whose very name spells paralysis, atonia [and] immobility". His death-like appearance is further stressed by the fact that Quinn is reminded of his own dead son, who uncannily was also named Peter. Upon first meeting young Stillman, the reader is sucked into a veritable �whiteout� of names, his nominal creativity being far more impressive than Quinn�s. After first having introduced himself as Peter Stillman only to disown that name, he goes on to denominate himself "Mr Sad", "Peter Rabbit", "Mr White" and "Mr Green" (later they both reappear in Ghosts), ending with "Peter Nobody" . Dawson observes that young Stillman in disowning his name indirectly rebels against his abusive father, his identity being, as Dawson further notes, "not dictated by his name, but by his random and irrational whims" . Adding to this, I will say that young Stillman�s plenitude of names has the effect of making up for the transparency and non-entity of his character. Obviously, the name of young Stillman�s wife puns �virgin� rather wittily, I think: For with her red lips, "seductive" eyes and "voluptuous" figure, Quinn�s first impression of her conflicts strongly with the common convention of �virginity�. Stillman�s nurse, we are told, is a Mrs Saavedra whose husband Michael Saavedra is the person who originally found Quinn�s phone number. With Michael Saavedra also being the Christian names of Miguel de Cervantes, who is the author of Don Quixote (a book about corrupted authorship), we here see the first example of how names of characters in one book reflect those of characters in another.

Comparatively, the second novel Ghosts is typified by sparseness in the selection of names, as the characters are literally degraded to merely representing the names of colours; Blue, Black, Brown, White and Green, including Gold and Snow. The name Black we see echoed at one point on the cover of Henry David Thoreau�s Walden, where one Walter J. Black features as the publisher. Later, in The Locked Room, a Dennis Walden appears as a childhood friend of Fanshawe and the narrator. Young Stillman�s Mr Green is resonated in the Stuart Green who publishes Fanshawe�s books, while Brown�s nom fascimile is a Jeffrey Brown, who appears as a former college of Fanshawe�s. His name is directly transplanted from Nathaniel Hawthorne�s story Wakefield, in which the protagonist Fanshawe abruptly deserts his wife, and exiles himself from society, much like Blue ends up doing in Ghosts. The fact that Hawthorne�s character has a wife named Sophie, just like the female character in The Locked Room, is yet another striking example of how characters and names in the NYT and the literary texts it draws on gesture back and forth to one another across �novel limits�.

�

Another and perhaps even more staggering aspect of the trilogy is the aspect of character doubling. In the section above, we saw how names are continuously recycled between major as well as minor characters. In the next section, I will elaborate further on this important topic by uncovering at least some of the inummerable examples of binary constellations that are responsible for the characters� connectedness. One could vacuum the pages for even more �loaded� examples, as the amount of doubles in the book is in deed inexhaustible. However, the examples that I will show here are those that are most pertinent in this particular context. From the starting point, none of the main characters embark on their respective cases of their own accord, either they are hired (Quinn and Blue) or asked (the Narrator) by another character. In addition, all three of them become readers of their subjects� texts; Quinn �reads� old Stillman�s letter-shaped routes, Blue reads Black�s manuscript and the Narrator reads Fanshawe�s red notebook. On top of this, there is an unnamed narrator who close to the end of City of Glass presents himself as a reader of Quinn�s red notebook. Furthermore, all the main characters are shaken and confused by their subjects� writings, and red notebooks are at the center of attention in all three novels, where they often appear in pairs. Thus, we see both Quinn and old Stillman writing in red notebooks. Likewise, Blue uses a notebook of unknown colour while watching Black while he too writes in a notebook using a red pen. Finally, there is Fanshawe who like Quinn closes his story by leaving behind a red notebook.

Physically, all the characters meet with their subjects three times. Quinn has three meetings with old Stillman and Blue also meets Black three times. With the Narrator it is different, owing to Fanshawe�s chronic absence. Nonetheless, he too meets his subject, albeit indirectly, at three occasions represented in the two letters he receives from Fanshawe before he finally �sees� him at the end. Notably, Alford points out the continuity between the three novels by quoting Alison Russell who has remarked that "Daniel Quinn is a writer turned detective, Blue is a detective turned writer, and the narrator of The Locked Room is a writer turned detective". To this I would like to add Paul Auster (i.e. the character) as a writer who perplexed by Quinn�s disappearance becomes a detective. A similar thing happens to another writer, namely Fanshawe, as he near the end admits to having spent months following Sophie and the Narrator like a detective. The result of this constant mutation is that characters gradually " become almost interchangeable with one another" as Brault states. With the overall resemblances now outlined, I will now probe into some separate cases of doubling starting out with Quinn, who on page 38 repeats a line from young Stillman�s monologue by satirically saying, "you bet your bottom dollar". Previously, young Stillman confessed on page 22 that he has got no sense of time, and similarly Quinn realises that he lost track of time while he was with Stillman, and therefore reminds himself on page 36 "to look at [his] watch more often". On page 19, young Stillman explains to Quinn that "[s]ooner or later I will run out of words � Everyone has just so many words inside him. And then where will I be?" At the closure of City of Glass, Quinn expresses precisely that same fear when he on page 131 writes: "What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?" Quinn, we learn, depends on Max Work in order to write his detective novels and on page 80 old Stillman reveals that he needed the fictional figure of Henry Dark in order to spread his own controversial theories. The first time the phone rings in Quinn�s apartment, he is in the process of reading Marco Polo�s Travels, and later the Narrator watches a movie about Marco Polo. Bizarrely, Quinn has a dream on page 9 about "firing a pistol into a bare white wall", by the end of The Locked Room when the Narrator is confronted with Fanshawe, he hears a " gun [go] off, followed by the sound of plaster falling to the floor". What also is common to all three protagonists is their ambivalent relationships to the telephone. Quinn, we hear, finds the phone disturbing and avoids using it altogether, and Blue feels an urge to call Mrs Blue but refrains from it, while the Narrator makes feeble attempts to contact Sophie during his drunken deroute in Paris.

While telling his story to Quinn, young Stillman at one point announces: "I am the end of everyone, the last man" . On page 75, old Stillman says to Quinn: "I�m the first. I�m the only one". By saying this he not only mimicks his son, he outright contradicts him thus making all connections between the characters seem arbitrary from now on. Later, Stillman makes it clear to Quinn that "when you live outside time, there is no day and night. You don�t even get a chance to die" . Because Quinn ends up in exactly such a situation at the end of the novel, this quote thwarts any suspicion that he dies. In deed, we meet him again in The Locked Room as the private detective Sophie initially hires. The proximity of Quinn and old Stillman is further supported by the fact that Quinn, after having ended his alley-life, walks precisely in the same manner as Stillman did, that is, "shuffling forward with slow, sliding steps" . At one point Quinn considers going to Paris, and in the last novel the Narrator actually goes to Paris in search of clues about Fanshawe�s whereabouts. Reversibly, the Narrator doubles Quinn when he at one point has thoughts about writing a detective novel. Finally, in referring to Quinn an unnamed narrator closes City of Glass with the announcement: "He will be with me always". Enthrallingly, the last novel opens with the Narrator declaring: "It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there" .

�

Distinctively, the three main characters are obstructed from getting a say in the stories in which they operate, being instead forced to seeing their own existences grow more and more contingent on those of their counterparts. Hence, old Stillman, Black and Fanshawe literally become dictators of their investigators� personal tales: Quinn by recording old Stillman�s movements in a notebook indirectly writes himself into the narrative. However, once the notebook runs out, Quinn follows suit. A similar thing holds true for the other main characters; only as long as their counterparts and their manuscripts are accessible can the main characters serve a function in the narrative, albeit subservient. It is Jens Fredslund who in his seminars thought up the excellent term "narrative parasites", which I here use to describe the positions of Quinn, Blue and the Narrator. Interestingly, this mode of illustration closely matches up with Barrone�s observation that "[w]hen a character loses his self-identity it is as if that character has been overfed on the character of another". Thus, in the following sections I will try to elaborate on this very important issue that is the unclearness of narration.

�

Before studying the narrative layers, I will briefly outline the narrative perspective of each novel as it immediately appears: City of Glass is a third person narrative, but is changed to first person during the last two pages, where an unknown and nameless character suddenly enters the scene. Ghosts begins in the third person omniscient, moves to the first person at the final stages and ends by addressing the readers through the use of the first person plural "we". The Locked Room, however, is narrated in the first person throughout. The narrative structure of each novel can be said to have three main layers. In City of Glass, Quinn is narrator of his own thoughts, and moreover he also serves as narrator/translator of the letter-routes formed by old Stillman who represents a third narrative layer, because he dictates Quinn�s story. The same thing applies to Blue, who is the narrator of his own meditations and the narrator of Black�s story, while he at the same time plays a role in the story that Black is writing. Equally, the Narrator in The Locked Room narrates his own thoughts as well as Fanshawe�s story, while also becoming part of a piece of fiction that is being crafted by Fanshawe

�

As mentioned above, the main characters can be regarded as narrative parasites due to their heavy reliance on their respective �hosts�. Thus, we see how Stillman�s every move provides Quinn with material that he can record in his red notebook. Just how dependent he is on Stillman�s existence becomes apparent, when he finds out that Stillman has "checked out" of the hotel and, consequently, checked out of the story it self. Although he receives this news as "the craziest thing [he] ever heard", he is forced to acknowledge that he was not "inside his skin" after all. Now a host-less parasite, he sees everything "reduced to chance" for with Stillman entirely gone there are "no moves to be made". As a result, he feels as if he "[has] lost half of himself".

Absurdly, Quinn retains his �parasitehood� by instead clinging to Virginia Stillman, or rather, the busy signal which not only indicates that is she unreachable, but that she too has deserted the story. Quinn, however, arrives at the conclusion that he must continue, seeing the busy signal as "a sign�telling him that he [can] not yet break his connection with the case". Like Quinn, Blue is seen taking on a parasite-like role in connection with Black. Only a couple of pages into the story he declares that "[t]he only way�to have a sense of what is happening is to be inside Black�s mind". Still, Blue�s close alliance with Black is of an arbitrary nature, in that he at times feels "completely in harmony with Black" and at others feels "cut off from him" in [such] a way�that he begins to lose sense of who he is". It all comes to a head when Blue on page 169 realizes that his life has been reduced "to almost no life at all" that he is "living only through the lives of others". As Pace has put it, "all that happens to [Blue] is a secondary reflection of Black�s actions".

As regards the Narrator in the final novel, it is a somewhat different case in that he is never really in physical contact with Fanshawe. Instead, the Narrator remains a nameless character who, as it is remarked in Barrone et al, "establishes the semi-nameless Fanshawe as his alter ego". In the course of the novel, however, the roles seem to becoming increasingly inverted so that Fanshawe, paradoxically by virtue of his absence, more and more becomes a parasite of the Narrator, making him into "no more than an invisible instrument". The fact that the Narrator is aware of these circumstances is seen on page 292, where he realizes that "[t]he whole process ha[s] been reversed". Fanshawe turns out to have such a sway over the Narrator that he begins to feel "haunted�even possessed", so unlike the other narrative parasites we have seen, Fanshawe�s role in the Narrator�s life is of an abusive and almost all-consuming nature. Eventually, the Narrator arrives at a conclusion by saying that "[Fanshawe] was gone � and I was gone along with him", and thus authenticates the fact that he is really a character under siege.

�

As I pointed out in the opening paragraph of this section, the main characters are constantly prevented from following their inner compulsion to break out of the story, and find their own narrative voice. Not only are they constrained by their counterparts, they are as Jens Fredslund has put it, "literally ousted by the story itself". Quinn, for example, demonstrates his lack of narrative autonomy when he on his way to the Stillmans� says to him self, "I seem to be going out�where exactly am I going". He just follows the text blindly, letting it answer his questions until he obliquely concludes: "I seem to have arrived". Later, on page 40, Quinn writes in his notebook to remind himself that he has "not been hired to understand � merely to act", which is another clear indication of his narratorial indisposition. In Ghosts, an omniscient narrator regularly intervenes to comment on the story�s development. Hence, on page 163, he ominously declares that to Blue "something is about to happen [and] nothing will ever be the same again".

Something even more revealing is the fact that all characters are subordinated even in the typography, as no quotation marks ever appear in direct speech, or even in the literary quotations. According to Jens Fredslund�s students, this can have two possible meanings: Either, the missing quotation marks indicate that the narrator of the story totally controls all the speakers, or, that whatever is said is supposed to flow freely into the text. Hence, by operating contingently, these two extraordinary features, i.e. narratorial commenting and deletion of quotating marks, give the story the appearance of being open-ended, moving in circles. Another somewhat bizarre detail occurs when Blue, disguised as a brush salesman, at one point refers to Black as "black" in the sentence saying: " But black says he�s managed so far without one". As with the lack of quotation marks, the missing capital letter is indicative of the narratorial arbitrariness that governs the novel, and it furthermore substantiates the impression that the characters are constructed.

�

4 INFLUENCE OF INTERTEXTUALITY

A principal feature in The New York Trilogy is the many intertextual elements, which repeatedly intersect it. However, I find it important to note that the use of intertextuality is, as I see it, most extensively used in the first two novels, whereas the last novel is only intertextual in the sense that it refers back to its two forerunners at a certain point. As a result, the first part of this section will primarily be focusing on some of the most pertinent examples of intertextuality in City of Glass and Ghosts. However, in section 4.2, which concerns the combination and creation of text, The Locked Room will, along with the two other stories, again be subjected to further analysis. First of all, explaining what the term intertextuality means and implies can be a somewhat difficult task, however, Clair offers a fine summary by formulating intertextuality as "the idea that all texts exist in a timeless field wherein they relate to and influence each other in all directions". In fact, there are three varieties of intertextuality embedded in The New York Trilogy: One is the variety of intertextuality that springs from a discourse between two particular texts, another is an intertextuality of subjectivity (i.e. when the author is involved in the text as a character) and lastly, there is the type of intertextuality, which stems from a discourse between a particular text and a given genre, in this case the detective genre.

�

The fact that intertextuality serves a significant purpose is seen explicated very early on in City of Glass, when Quinn, alluding to his own books, states that "[w]hat interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories". This observation Quinn presents here coincides resplendently with what the literary theorist who initially coined the term intertextuality, Julia Kristeva, has noted, namely that every text relates mainly to other texts rather than to outer reality. Another intertextual element of consequence placed very early in the novel is the quotation from the Marco Polo text: "We will set down things as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication". In the latter part of City of Glass, the unknown narrator gestures back to Polo�s statement when he announces that "[s]ince this story is based entirely on facts, the author feels it is his duty not to overstep the bounds of the verifiable, to resist at all costs the perils of invention". He recaps this point by the very end, when he swears that he in dealing with Quinn�s discarded notebook did "[his] best with it and [has] refrained from any interpretation".

Another sort of intertextuality - intertextuality of subjectivity, comes most clearly into view in the chapter where Quinn and Paul Auster together engage in a theoretical discussion about the issue of authorship in Cervante�s Don Quixote. In this connection Paul Auster comments several times on Cervantes� writing himself into the story. However, this is precisely what Auster is also himself doing, as he involves a character with the same name and social status as himself in a text that he is the author of. According to Linda K. Marshall, who is quoted by Clair, this "makes the point that this particular text is both controlled by an �other�, and that �other is itself a text". Equally notable are the speculations Auster relates to Quinn about "the book inside the book Cervantes wrote", because they inevitably induce the reader to acknowledge the thematic connections between that book and City of Glass. A further speculation presented by Auster is the possibility that Cid Hamete Benengeli is really a construction of four different people. This is something that any alert reader will see as having been so far reflected in Quinn, who has also taken on four different identities, these being (apart from himself) Max Work, William Wilson and Paul Auster. Precisely because we in this chapter hear statements about specific issues that are pertinent to both works in question a dialogue is created between them, which in actual fact places them in a mutual discursive realm: For the story, in deed, the trilogy as a whole, follows the traditional. stylistic �formula� of the detective genre, albeit inconsistently: Questions are raised and answers are eagerly pursued, but in spite of all this the rewarding closure, which the reader expects, is never delivered. Thus, an intertextual dialogue can also be seen at play between the stories and the detective novel as a genre, albeit ironically, insofar as the stories overall simulate, yet, recurrently distort the detective form.

In Ghosts there are also several intertextual references that catapult the story into motion, causing expectations to loom in the reader. These, however, are time and again disappointingly dislodged in that the story chronically abstains from producing the anticipated outcome. Blue expresses this frustration quite clearly in the scene where he, dutifully reflecting Black, reads in Thoreau�s Walden and is thoroughly disappointed because he "thought he was going to get a story, or at least have something like a story". In Blue�s view, the story "is an endless harangue about nothing at all". However, further down the page Thoreau�s assertion that "[b]ooks must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written" retrieves Blue�s concentration and "helps to some extent". What is enthralling about this specific situation is the fact that not only is a dialogue created between the story and Walden, as was also the case with City of Glass and Don Quixote; the dialogue is actually extended to include readers of the text, and hence forms a virtual �trialogue�: For while Blue struggles to find a meaning with the text he reads, we as readers of his story struggle, perhaps even slow down, in order to make sense of what is happening to him. Also, to the degree that Walden endorses the illusion of solitude, so is Blue disillusioned about his solitary co-existence with Black so that Ghosts, then, may literally be considered a �quasi-Walden�. Hence, due to Ghosts reliance on Walden one may go as far as to regard it as being a literary parasite of that text. Seen from an intertextual point of view, however, Ghosts� �feeding� on Walden is not overly distinctive as Kristeva, further quoted in Clair, has emphasized that "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another text".

�

Likewise, the three main characters are engaged in what seems an act of absorbing and transforming texts as a method of making sense of their respective cases. What is the common kick-off for both Quinn, Blue and the Narrator�s writing activities is the lack of text. Hence, we hear that Quinn obtains a red notebook so that "things might not get out of control", which serves as a sort of substitute for the unreachable notebook that Stillman uses, but also "[forms] a secret link between them". To start with, Stillman�s daily routes are what set off Quinn�s writing in his notebook, but nevertheless a glimmer of growing creative autonomy is suggested on the night Quinn "[f]or no particular reason" begins to re-enact Stillman�s wanderings using his pen as if "looking for a sign". However, what he reconstructs in the notebook with his pen turns out to resemble letters, but due to their concurrent emergence this seems utterly incredulous to Quinn. Yet, he is forced to construe that the letters, ostensibly forming the sentence "The Tower of Babel", are "not in the streets where they had been drawn, but in [his] red notebook". The transcription of Stillman�s footsteps seems to be Quinn�s effort to produce the one thing that is not there, which is text. But near the end, when locked up in a small room like another Peter Stillman, Quinn is seen gaining authorial ground through a self-directed writing "about the stars, the earth [and] his hopes for mankind". The existential countdown Quinn gradually goes through develops in sync with the expiration of the notebook�s pages, which is why the end of it must be faced "with courage". A gripping twist occurs when the nameless first person character explains the reader that he merely transcribed this story from Quinn�s abandoned notebook, because Paul Auster did not want to keep it. As a result, the story deceptively becomes an author-less text in the same style as Don Quixote.

In Ghosts, Blue continues to reflect this general theme of textual convolution, in that he also records every detail in reports and in a notebook about Black, who nearly always sits writing in his notebook. Black�s actions are literally spelled out in Blue�s notebook, but these actions are so incredibly static and predictable that Blue is eventually compelled to determine which one of them is essential to his reports.. Hence, he becomes both observer and interpreter of Black�s life, which is unnerving to Blue because he now "can no longer trust what he sees". Also, we see how he interprets his bleak situation by means of a suggestive phrase from Walden, which he has not only read, but written down in his notebook as well. This is as much an example of how a dialogical exchange between this story and Walden is formed, as it is an intriguing representation of text that it is both intertextual and reproduced at the same time.

Blue, we hear, is literally caught in the middle between Black and White, is only singular so long as he is the colour that may differentiate the [B]lack letters on the [W]hite pages. The absurdity of all this is firmly consolidated by the end, when Blue together with the reader learns that Black�s manuscript is just a copy of his own reports "spelled out in black and white�saying nothing". Thus, the piece of original text that apparently was in the making during the story turns out to be only a second-hand reproduction of Blue�s story, which Blue of course knows by heart and the readers know as well, because they have been reading the story all along. In this way, we end with yet another a text disengaged from a finite author, a text marked hence by a lack of closure that is owed to the arbitrary variation of narrative layers.

Similarly, we learn that the Narrator in The Locked Room begins to write the story of his experience with writing Fanshawe�s biography, seeing this gesture as the "one chance [he has] to escape". As opposed to the two previous stories, an abandoned text is being handed over to the main character already at the beginning of the story, but in dealing with it the Narrator finds it "an intolerable position to be in", akin to Blue�s feeling trapped in two cases at the same time. Likewise, the Narrator is at one point marked by creative incapacity, which means that he for a while can merely "copy out passages from books", and one of these, a passage from Spinoza, he finds indicative of his own condition as it says that "when he dreams he does not want to write, he does not have the power to dream he wants to write". This is another exhibition of intertextual and reproduced text comparable to what has been seen in Ghosts. In the course of writing Fanshawe�s biography, the Narrator creates text only so far as he is "piecing together the story of a man�s life" by "making lists�drawing maps�hunting for leads", like Quinn did with Stillman�s letter-shaped routes. Yet, on one of the final pages he describes a momentous turning point marked by productivity where "words followed�only because [he] had no choice but to accept them", which corresponds to Quinn who at the end of City of Glass "felt that his words had been severed from him". In agreeing to write a biography, the Narrator attempts to re-enact Fanshawe�s life, while at the same time asserting some measure of creative power by considering Sophie�s advice to make the biography "as much about [him] as about [Fanshawe]". However, it turns out that while in the process of re-mapping Fanshawe�s life, the Narrator actually was �the subject of his subject�, in that Fanshawe investigated his and Sophie�s life and wrote it into his final text which, as he eventually tells the Narrator, "was all written for you".

Overall, The Locked Room comes to serve a double function, because it both contains a recount of Fanshawe�s life as well as the Narrator�s own story, just like Sophie foresaw. Hence, the Narrator literally writes himself out of Fanshawe�s fictitious grip by instead writing a fiction about the fiction Fanshawe wrote. In this way, he is the one of the three main characters who reasserts his identity most fully, as he develops from being merely an adapter/creator of text, like Quinn and Blue, to eventually becoming his own auto-biographer.

�

Oozing through the whole trilogy is the notion that everything is ambiguous because nothing never really is but only seems, which suggests that uncertainty and contradiction are defining parameters in the story. In deed, everything that happens, happens at the dictates of chance: A wrong number is what sets Quinn�s story into motion, and direct speech is allowed to flow into the main text in Ghosts, while the Narrator begins an entirely new life only by virtue of Fanshawe�s sudden disappearance. All this gives the stories a shared texture of transparency that necessarily helps to tie them even closer. Thus, in the following section I will examine those of the indicative places in the text, which endorse my point that events occur arbitrarily, as well as point out a few of the symbols that stress the prominence of ambiguity in the trilogy.

�

5.1 THE SEEMING-NESS OF CHARACTERS AND EVENTS

Firstly, an enthralling example of ambiguity can be detected in the chapter where Quinn and Paul Auster meet. Here, it becomes apparent that the true Paul Auster is not the private detective both the readers and Quinn thought he was, but a writer. When he says, "I�m afraid you�ve got the wrong Paul Auster", he sums up the essence of this absurd situation, which is further stressed by Quinn�s replying, "You�re the only one in the book", where "book" here can be a pun on telephone book and this novel. The roles are deftly reverted by the end of the chapter, when Paul Auster asks Quinn, "Are you in the book?" and Quinn answers, "Yes�[t]he only one". Another noteworthy scene is the one taking place at the train station between Quinn and a deaf mute, because it is from this man that Quinn buys the pen which enables him to start writing in the notebook. What is significant about this is the fact that Quinn hereafter consistently refers to the pen as "the deaf mute�s pen" and not his own. Like the misplaced phone call triggered by Michael Saavedra�s faulty reference to Paul Auster as a detective, the deaf mute serves as another arbitrary catalyst for the story�s take-off: For in "leaving Quinn with the pen in his hand", a man who ironically cannot relate anything himself activates the story, and Quinn complies to this.

Generally, there is a sustained notion of uncertainty running through each of the stories brought about by the extensive use of "perhaps" and phrases beginning "it seemed". In deed, The Locked Room opens with the Narrator saying, "It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there". As stated by Barrone et al, this "seems" placed already in the first sentence "posits the tenuous nature of countless assertions in the novel". Again and again, the characters have doubts about the legitimacy of the events that take place, and as a result the viability of knowledge is problematized. In City of Glass, this comes clearly into view when Quinn upon detecting the legibility of Stillman�s routes momentarily decides that he "[has] imagined the whole thing". This sentiment matches up with what Blue goes through in monitoring Black, as he at one point tells himself, "What happened is not really what happened". When Fanshawe�s first novel is received with critical acclaim, the Narrator feeling "a little shocked" about this strikes a similar note of scepticism, by observing that "[s]uch things are not supposed to happen in the real world". When the Narrator goes into detail about his childhood with Fanshawe, he further demonstrates the unreliability of things relayed in the story by confessing, "Even memories can be false". Even later, he reassesses this idea when he proclaims, "Everyone knows that stories are imaginary", and in so doing indirectly questions the authenticity of his own story.

�

Something that strongly influences the trilogy is a permanent notion of inconclusion, which is being both explicitly and tacitly illustrated in the course of the three stories. Firstly, we learn through Paul Auster�s enquiry that the title of Quinn�s first book was Unfinished Business. It is significant therefore that Quinn�s "business" with Peter Stillman is never finished, and that Stillman�s business with re-naming things remains uncompleted. The same thing goes for his first experiment, because his son was not locked up all his life even though this had been the intention. Equally, the sequence of letters that Quinn arbitrarily reads as the sentence "The Tower of Babel" is incomplete in that the first four and the last two letters are missing, and this in fact corresponds with the biblical Tower of Babel, which neither was completed. Another example of an uncompleted work is seen in Ghosts, where Blue learns from Black that the book he is writing on is not yet finished. Uncannily, the Narrator, after having read Fanshawe�s last text, describes it as "unfinished, to be started again". In the last novel, Quinn re-appears as a detective hired by Sophie to track down Fanshawe, but he eventually gives up and the case is left unresolved. Later, the roles are reverted, when the Narrator begins to investigate Quinn�s whereabouts working intensely on this project for months, only to conclude that "nothing came of it". On arriving in Paris, he fails to locate the people that could have given him the breaking clues about Fanshawe, and these "blanks in the picture" finally make him realize that "the work [can] never be truly finished".

�

However, "a story cannot dwell on what might have been", as Blue at one point reminds himself, and in deed this is never the case in either of the novels, since they are all governed by the same uncanny lack of clarification: In each story characters follow a number of clues that eventually only lead to dead ends, and this inescapably results in a deferral of conclusion. On the last page of City of Glass, for instance, the narrator in referring to Quinn says that "it is impossible for me to say where he is now". Well before this, we hear Quinn declare that "[h]e had nothing, he knew nothing, he knew that he knew nothing" and, just a few lines down, he decides that "nothing is certain". However, the pressure increases to such an extent that he at one point "felt nothing, as though the whole thing added up to nothing at all", and therefore later concludes that he "[has] come to the end of himself�there [is] nothing left".

As regards Blue, he sooner or later realizes that the case in which he has invested his whole life is a case of nothingness, since he "can only surmise what the case is not". Although Blue learns "a thousand facts" about Black, he is forced to admit that "he knows nothing". When he finally gets to read the text that could hold the solution to the case, it is "meaning nothing, saying nothing", and the whole story finishes with the anti-conclusion that "from now on, we know nothing". Equally, The Locked Room by having the Narrator tear out the last page of the notebook just as the train is leaving not only makes the trilogy end irresolutely, but "unfinished to be started again" like Fanshawe�s final work. As Barrone et al sees it, this means that The New York Trilogy "collapses into its own sublime namelessness, vanishing into the same �dead of the night� during which Quinn�s telephone rings at the beginning of City of Glass". However, despite the futility that defines each character�s case and the riddling deferral of a settling closure, I would nevertheless argue that the trilogy could not be said to disappear into nothingness completely. For as the Narrator at one point asserts: "Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever".

�

Evidently, even the most meticulous reading of The New York Trilogy cannot wholly explain all of its intricate minutiae, unless one zooms in on a specific topic and a limited number of pressing themes in connection with this topic. Therefore, I chose to dedicate my thesis exclusively to the two core topics of identity and narration together with the contextual sub-themes of intertextuality, ambiguity and finally nothingness. Hence, by doing a comparative and contrastive reading of the individual novels as well as by drawing on outside scholarly sources, I have succeeded in demonstrating how the issue of identity runs parallel with the issues of narration and intertextuality, including that of textual creativity. One particular concern of this thesis has been through analysis to uncover the means by which the formation and disintegration of identity is carried out. Pertaining to this I found out that the characters� notion of identity was effectively thwarted as a result of the rigorous multiplication of selves and character doublings, including their rather flexible interchange of names. Furthermore, it is clear now that the main characters only by clinging to the lives and writings of their respective counterparts were able to generate some sense of self. Ironically, my analysis showed that it is precisely the vigorous research of an other�s identity which leads to Quinn and Blue�s permanent breakdown of identity, while the Narrator in re-creating Fanshawe�s story and embedding it into his own eventually frees himself from fictive domination.

Concerning the trilogy�s diffusion of narrative perspectives my analysis revealed that several narratives are being unfolded, in that the characters are seen narrating one anothers� stories in connection with relaying their own. This means that there is never an entirely fixed narrative perspective from which the trilogy is recounted to us, which thus suggests that "[t]he centre, then, is everywhere" as in the detective stories that Quinn takes pleasure in reading.

Although the three novels were originally written and published separately, the purpose of this thesis was through an investigation of the shared themes of identity and narration to illustrate their closeness. My analysis showed that paradoxes, contradictions and the general occurrence of irresolution caused, among others, by the very splintering of identities and complexity of narration are governing factors in all three stories, because they give them a shared absurd cast and hence connect them.

Another significant result is the fact that the use of intertextuality actually sets off a dialogue between the individual story and another text, and thus has a bearing on the reader�s interpretation of it. As for the intertextual signals that were shown to shuttle back and forth between the stories they are of importance, since they present themselves to all readers regardless of their literary experience. Thus, the build up of the trilogy not only promotes intertextuality between the individual stories as one collective unit and other literary texts, but also an intertextual referencing between the three stories individually.

As for the deliberate omission of autobiographical speculations in the thesis, they proved as superfluous as I anticipated, although it is interesting to note now that Paul Auster once has confessed that "to a greater or lesser degree, every novel is autobiographical". Nevertheless, I will agree with Barrone et al when it is argued that "[q]uestions, paradoxes [and] mysteries: these, and not autobiographical verities, are at the heart of Auster�s writing". In deed, like Fanshawe�s notebook, the trilogy in the end "answer[s] the question by asking another question", and it is precisely by reason of this that the trilogy may appear to the reader as "open, unfinished, to be started again". This seems to match up with Paul Auster�s own remark that books ideally should be regarded as a "springboard for the imagination".

Hence, on basis of this I will conclude that the true endpoint of The New York Trilogy is more that of possibility than of nothingness, due to the fact that there is no definitive conclusion, so that interpretation therefore is made a process that necessarily has to take place between the trilogy and the individual reader. Accordingly, Paul Auster himself has once said with respect to The New York Trilogy that he hopes,

"it�s inexhaustible�that you�re going to keep thinking about it and keep testing your reaction and come up with new things".

�

�

�

Signed and handed in May 21, 2003

�

Reidun Dahl

�

�

�