be used to analyze Auster's trilogy.

The title of the first volume, City of Glass, is a play on Augustine's The City of God, a neoplatonic treatise that suggests that an eternal order exists outside the realm of sense: Augustine's work posits transcendence or, in Derrida's terms, presence. The title City of Glass also connotes transparency; thus Daniel Quinn, the novel's detective and protagonist, becomes a pilgrim searching for correspondence between signifiers and signifieds. The search for transparent language is predominantly visual, a characteristic alluded to in the narrator's discussion of the phrase “private eye” in the novel's first chapter.

The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter “i,” standing for “investigator,” it was “I” in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him.⁴

Quinn, as a writer of mystery novels, exists in a world dominated by signifiers and assumed solutions. The first chapter of City of Glass describes the function of the writer-detective and reveals the metaphor that will be employed—and deconstructed—in all three volumes of The New York Trilogy: “The detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable” (15). This passage offers a multiplicity of orientations, as the detective metaphor applies to Quinn, to Auster, and to the relationship between the two. It is also a “clue” to the mystery of The New York Trilogy because Auster is always both inside and outside his three texts. The narrator of the first volume continually denies any one locus of meaning, yet teases the reader with the possibility of one: “The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end” (15). By directing our attention to the end of the book and to a possible solution, the narrator forces us to participate in the detective's game.

As a genre, the detective story is end-dominated, and its popularity attests to Western culture's obsession with closure. By denying closure, and by sprinkling his trilogy with references to other end-dominated texts, Auster continually disseminates the meaning of this detective story. The detective story also necessitates a movement backward in time, from the corpse to the crime, so to speak. In City of Glass, Quinn's quest for an ultimate referent leads him into an investigation of the origin of logos; his quest becomes a pursuit of paternal authority associated with creation and also a quest for his own identity. In the beginning of the novel, Quinn is described as a mystery novelist who writes stories about the detective Max Work under the pseudonym William Wilson (an allusion to Poe's story about doubles and, later in the novel, to the baseball player Mookie Wilson). The narrator alludes to Quinn's identity crisis by withholding information: “Who he was, where he came from, and what he did are of no great importance” (7). Essentially, Quinn is a paper-Auster, a mere linguistic construct of the author himself: “As a young man he had published several books of poetry, had written plays, critical essays, and had worked on a number of long translations” (9). Although Quinn suspects that he is not real, he is not aware that he is Auster's creation. The novel becomes increasingly comic when Quinn receives middle-of-the-night telephone calls for the Paul Auster Detective Agency. Quinn tells the mysterious caller, “[T]here is no Paul Auster here” (13).

Logocentrism in The New York Trilogy is closely associated with paternal authority. Quinn's unconscious denial of his creator's presence suggests the loss of the Father, the ultimate authority and founder of logos—the word. Quinn usurps the role of the Father when he assumes the identity of Paul Auster (of the detective agency)—when he meets his client, Peter Stillman, he thinks of “his own dead son,” but “just as suddenly as the thought had appeared, it vanished” (25). Quinn is unable to posit the determinacy characteristic of paternal authority. The interview with Stillman strikes Quinn as strange and unreal, and “as a consequence, he could never be sure of any of it” (23). Significantly, Quinn is hired to find and tail the father of his client, also named Peter Stillman. The elder Stillman had attempted to find God's language thirteen years earlier by keeping his young son in a locked dark room for nine years. As a product of this experiment, the son babbles incoherently to Quinn, unable to affirm his own identity: “For now, I am Peter Stillman. That is not my real name. I cannot say who I will be tomorrow. … But that makes no difference. To me. Thank you very much. I know you will save my life, Mr. Auster. I am counting on you” (36-37). Like his language, Stillman himself lacks solidity—he moves like a marionette “trying to walk without strings” and dresses completely in white (25). At one point in their meeting, “Quinn suddenly felt that Stillman had become invisible” (26). Everything about Stillman and the Stillman case lacks substance, for they are fictions within the larger fiction of City of Glass.

Quinn's pursuit of the Father is a search for authority and “author-ity.” In looking for the creator of logos, he is looking for his own creator as well, but his investigation is subverted by Auster's authorial duplicity. In many ways, City of Glass is a reworking of Don Quixote, a book that also denies its own authority while claiming to be a true story. When Virginia Stillman tells Quinn that she was referred to the Paul Auster Detective Agency by Michael Saavedra (Cervantes's family name), Quinn becomes the quixotic hero, the unknowing victim of a strange conspiracy. This possible “solution” to City of Glass is exfoliated in chapter ten, when Quinn decides to contact the “real” Paul Auster for help with his case. This Auster claims to know nothing about a detective agency. He is a writer, he explains to Quinn, working on an essay about the hoax of Don Quixote. Don Quixote “orchestrated the whole thing himself,” Auster tells Quinn, duping Cervantes into “hiring Don Quixote to decipher the story of Don Quixote himself” (153-54). This analysis, when applied to City of Glass, raises a number of questions about the book's authorship, and results in endless doublings and mirror images. When Quinn meets Auster's young son, also named Daniel, he tells the boy, “I'm you, and you're me.” The boy replies, “and around and around it goes” (157).

Quinn's investigation becomes an obsessive search for an ultimate authority, for his research on the elder Stillman leads him to believe that this “father” holds the key to finding a way back to pure logos. He reads Stillman's book, The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World, in which Stillman analyzes Paradise Lost, identifying words that embodied two equal and opposite meanings—“one before the fall and one after the fall” (70). This ironic deconstructive reading of Milton's text results in Stillman's own quest for prelapsarian language: he prophecies a new paradise based upon his reading of Henry Dark's pamphlet, The New Babel (75). According to Derridean philosophy, Dark's (and Stillman's) return to pure logos is impossible because of the nature of language. As a play of differences, language offers no basis for attributing a determinate meaning to any word or utterance.

The quixotic Quinn, deluded by Stillman's book, stalks the old man throughout the labyrinth of New York City, recording Stillman's every move in a red notebook (possibly a parodic allusion to Wittgenstein's The Blue and Brown Books). By keeping Stillman in his sight, Quinn is attempting to retain “presence,” but in rereading his notebook, he “often discovered that he had written two or even three lines on top of each other, producing a jumbled, illegible palimpsest” (100). Words continually fail to produce an absolute meaning for Quinn, for Stillman's movements always remain divorced from the words in the red notebook. Repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to decipher the meaning of Stillman's patterned walks through the city, Quinn decides to confront physically the logocentric father. Presenting himself alternately as Paul Auster, Henry Dark, and Peter Stillman, Quinn discusses language, lies, and history with the old man. Stillman tells Quinn, “A lie can never be undone. … I am a father, and I know about these things. Remember what happened to the father of our country” (133). By referring to one of the most popular fictions of American history, Stillman unwittingly subverts his own authority. His attempt to rename the world is doomed to failure.

By the end of the novel, fiction is piled upon fiction, negating any one meaning or solution to the mystery of City of Glass. The narrator interrupts his own narrative in Cervantes's fashion, claiming both ownership and authorship of the text: “Since this story is based entirely on facts, the author feels it his duty not to overstep the bounds of the verifiable, to resist at all costs the perils of invention. Even the red notebook, which until now has provided a detailed account of Quinn's experiences, is suspect” (173). The narrator is a self-undermining linguistic agent, offering truth and then subverting the possibility of truth, continually denying his readers any one locus of meaning.

As the novel “ends,” City of Glass illustrates Derridean dissemination. Quinn literally vanishes from the text when he runs out of space in his red notebook, seemingly imploding into the text of City of Glass: “It was as though he had melted into the walls of the city” (178). Similarly, Peter Stillman and his wife have disappeared, while the elder Stillman has supposedly committed suicide. In City of Glass, characters “die” when their signifiers are omitted from the printed page. All that remains is the cryptic conclusion of the narrator, who claims to have received Quinn's notebook from his friend, the writer Paul Auster.

As for Quinn, it is impossible for me to say where he is now. I have followed the red notebook as closely as I could, and any inaccuracies in the story should be blamed on me. There were moments when the text was difficult to decipher, but I have done my best with it and have refrained from any interpretation. The red notebook, of course, is only half the story, as any sensitive reader will understand. As for Auster, I am convinced that he behaved badly throughout. If our friendship has ended, he has only himself to blame. As for me, my thoughts remain with Quinn. He will be with me always. And wherever he may have disappeared to, I wish him luck. (202-03)

The narrator's conclusion shows this fiction to be a game against itself. His assertion deconstructs itself through references to the indeterminacy of the red notebook. City of Glass is a paranoid text in its uncertainty and contradictory frames of reference.

In Ghosts, the second volume of the trilogy, Auster presents another version of this detective story. This text, as a repetitive but also differing collection of signifiers, continues to illustrate Derridean différance, both within the text itself and in its differences from City of Glass. Like its predecessor, Ghosts defers the possibility of a solution or meaning. Again, Auster explores and deconstructs the logocentric quest for origin—the origin of language, but also the origin of “self.” The story begins on February 3, 1947 (the author's birthdate), a movement backward in time appropriate to the text's illustration of différance. In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida explains that

différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be “present,” appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element. This trace relates no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and it constitutes what is called the present by this very relation to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not; that is, not even to a past or future considered as a modified present.⁵

Thus, in Ghosts, we read the narrator's statement, “the time is the present,” followed two pages later by a contradicting statement: “It is February 3, 1947. … But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold.”⁶Ghosts is a “trace” of a past element that was never fully present; therefore, the novel's detective protagonist, Blue, is shown to be increasingly obsessed with “presence.” Like Daniel Quinn, Blue's identity is inextricably related to language. Since différance destroys the notion of a simple presence, identity and the origin of self are equally destroyed, for origin is always other than itself.

The title of Ghosts, like City of Glass, suggests transparency, the ideal logocentric relationship between signifier and signified, but it also connotes a lack of substance. Ghosts contains fewer pages, characters, and plot complications than the other two volumes of the trilogy. The book is a “ghost” of City of Glass and of the detective story genre: the “meat” of the text is stripped down to a generic level, reinforced by Auster's rejection of nomenclature and his use of Film Noir signifiers. Auster's reductionist technique in Ghosts is in itself a form of deception—it suggests that the details of the story will be presented in black-and-white, transparent facts that will lead to the solution of the trilogy. The opening lines of the book are equally deceptive in their sparing use of language and their structural similarity to Biblical syntax: “First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown” (7). These bare “facts,” with their connotations of creation, begin the deconstructive process of the text by illustrating the movement of signification as a distortion of the linear regression to origin.

Ghosts, as an investigation of origin, also suggests the parallel search for truth—truth as measured by visual presence. Blue, the protagonist-detective, is hired by White “to follow a man named Black and to keep an eye on him for as long as necessary” (7). Truth, for Blue, is always limited to that which he can see: “Words are transparent for him, great windows that stand between him and the world” (23-24). Blue dutifully writes his reports on Black for the never present or visible White, but he becomes frustrated with the ineffectiveness of language: “He discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say” (25-26).

Blue's obsession with transparency is rooted in the primacy he gives to visual perception. He attends a baseball game, “struck by the sharp clarity of the colors around him,” and is fond of movies because “the pictures on the screen are somehow like the thoughts inside his head” (42, 44). When Blue's vision is obscured, language (and therefore truth or meaning) becomes opaque to him: “Without being able to read what Black has written, everything is a blank so far” (11). Significantly, when Blue experiences this failure of language, he begins to think about his dead father and other dead or rejecting father figures. Blue's memories of lost fathers result in the loss of his own identity. He feels as if he is becoming one with Black, “so completely in harmony … that to anticipate what Black is going to do, to know when he will stay in his room and when he will go out, he needs merely to look into himself” (38).

Although Blue occasionally ventures out of his room, he exists essentially in a hermetic space. Ghosts is a self-enclosed structure of self-mirrorings, but it is also a mirror image, in some ways, of the first and third volumes of The New York Trilogy. Much of the book consists of Blue looking out of his window to observe and write about Black, who sits by a window in a building across the street writing and looking back at Blue. Blue reads Walden because he sees Black reading Walden, but he feels trapped in the process: “He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life … seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others” (57). Blue's description of Walden is self-reflexive: “There is no story, no plot, no action—nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book” (58). Blue becomes trapped in the hermetic world of the text: “How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?” (58). Blue verges on insanity when Black claims that he, too, is a private detective hired “to watch someone … and send in a report about him every week” (73). Experiencing complete ontological instability, Blue tries to recover language by verbally cataloguing objects according to their color, but he realizes that “there is no end to it” (77). The colors blue, black, and white are meaningless distinctions, he realizes, for each can be applied to any number of people, places, and things.

Ghosts is not merely a reductive version of City of Glass, despite its stripped-down quality and bared concepts. In many ways, the second volume of the trilogy offers itself as a collection of the signs that make up American culture, taken from baseball, popular movies, and the canonical texts and authors of nineteenth-century literature. These artifacts of our collective identity haunt the pages of Ghosts, raising the issue of whether or not original discourse is possible. Just as language is divorced from the things it signifies, texts themselves become divorced from their creators. When Black recounts anecdotes about the “ghosts” of New York City, he provides Blue with a lesson about the flesh and spirit of the writer. Whitman's brain, Black recalls, was removed from his body to be measured and weighed, but it was dropped on the floor: “The brains of America's greatest poet got swept up and thrown out with the garbage” (63). Black is equally amused by Thoreau's visit to Whitman, a meeting that took place next to Whitman's full chamber pot.

That chamber pot, you see, somehow reminds me of the brains on the floor. … There's a definite connection. Brains and guts, the insides of a man. We always talk about trying to get inside a writer to understand his work better. But when you get right down to it, there's not much to find in there—at least not much that's different from what you'd find in anyone else. (65)

Black's anecdotes reveal his concern with the solipsistic existence of the writer's life. He tells Blue how Hawthorne sat in a room for twelve years to write, a situation similar to his own: “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he's there, he's not really there” (66). The writer is a ghost, a trace. In Of Grammatology, Derrida explains that there is nothing outside of textuality, outside of “the temporalization of a lived experience which is neither in the world nor in ‘another world.’”⁷

This “problem” is the crux of the mystery in Ghosts. Black and Blue are both inside and outside one another, oppositions of what Derrida calls a “violent hierarchy”: “one of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.) or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment.”⁸ Throughout Ghosts, Black has the upper hand, as it is he who hired Blue. When Blue decides that he must deny Black's existence in order to prove his own, he sets out “to erase the whole story” (89). In the novel's final scenes, Blue and Black are intent upon killing one another, and their physical struggle illustrates Derrida's “violent hierarchy.” Although Blue appears to be the victor, he is not sure whether the sound of Black's breath is coming from Black or from himself (94).

The final volume of The New York Trilogy,The Locked Room, takes its title from a popular motif of detective novels: a murdered body is discovered in a sealed room, the exits of which have been locked from the inside. Auster complicates the conventional puzzle by omitting the corpse in The Locked Room (another denial of presence). The third version of this repeating story continues to keep différance in play by rejecting the binary opposites inherent in Western traditions and philosophies. In The Locked Room, each side of the dualism is inextricably related to the other; thus, like Black and Blue in Ghosts, the narrator (the protagonist of this volume) and his counterpart Fanshawe experience a mutually parasitic relationship.

Binary opposition is deconstructed on a larger scale throughout The New York Trilogy, not only because the work is in three parts, but because the texts are linked parasitically: references to Quinn, Stillman, and Henry Dark reappear in The Locked Room, just as subtle allusions in the first and second volumes foreshadow events in the third. The oscillation of the dominating term of any hierarchy is also illustrated by the changing hierarchy of the terms “writer” and “detective”: Daniel Quinn is a writer turned detective, Blue a detective turned writer, and the narrator of The Locked Room a writer turned detective. Since deconstruction rejects the notion of a single self, these three novels, as linguistic constructs, also serve as the selves of Auster.

The logocentric quest in The Locked Room differs from that of the preceding volumes in several ways. Quinn and Blue are able to confront Stillman and Black physically, but the narrator of The Locked Room is frustrated in his attempts to find evidence of the physical presence of his childhood friend, Fanshawe, who has mysteriously disappeared. He has only the words of Fanshawe, the unpublished novels he inherits as Fanshawe's literary executor. As soon as he gains possession of Fanshawe's manuscripts, he usurps the role—the life—of his friend. He marries Fanshawe's wife, adopts his son, and considers the idea of publishing Fanshawe's books as his own. Unlike Quinn and Blue, the narrator of The Locked Room has access only to the language, the signifiers, of his counterpart, never to his physical presence. When he learns that Fanshawe is not dead, he sets out to recover and re-create presence in a search that takes him to Fanshawe's mother and childhood home, to his haunts in Paris, and, finally, to a locked room. His quest for Fanshawe turns out to be a quest for himself, for his own identity, since like Black and Blue, the narrator and Fanshawe are inseparable.

If these novels are linguistic constructs of the author, Paul Auster, their protagonists' quests for an ultimate authority and identity serve as ironic frames for the author's own logocentric quest for origin, a quest he himself continually deconstructs. Early in The Locked Room, the narrator wonders “what it means when a writer puts his name on a book, why some writers choose to hide behind a pseudonym, whether or not a writer has a real life anyway.”⁹ This echo of Black's reference to Hawthorne (Fanshawe, ironically, is the title of an early novel by Hawthorne) raises again the question of the writer's nonlife. In The Locked Room, Auster suggests that language can destroy identity as well as create it. The narrator, in attempting to write a biography of Fanshawe, realizes that life, the “essential thing,” resists telling.

We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another—for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself. (80-81)

This is the problem of the writer, as well as of the reader. The Locked Room is a “locked room” for Auster himself: it contains the life of Auster, not only in the sense that it contains his words, but also in its biographical elements. Auster is inside and outside his text, fighting for the upper hand of Derrida's “violent hierarchy.” Since the self in the text must die when the story ends, the rewriting of the detective story in The New York Trilogy is also a deferment of death for the author. The narrator says, however, that “stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out” (63). The solution for Auster, then, is to posit no one self but many selves.

The narrator's logocentric quest for origin (for his search for Fanshawe is undertaken ostensibly to collect data for a biography of his friend) involves a deterministic single-minded approach to what he sees as a self-contained entity. Instead, he accumulates information and learns that Fanshawe has many lives.

A life touches one life, which in turn touches another life, and very quickly the links are innumerable, beyond calculation. … Faced with a million bits of random information, led down a million paths of false inquiry, I had to find the one path that would take me where I wanted to go. (131)

In Paris, where words become a “collection of sounds” without meaning, the narrator loses the ability to distinguish between signifiers and signifieds: “Thoughts stop where the world begins. … But the self is also in the world” (143). In place of stable meaning, he finds what Derrida calls “free-play.” He becomes exhilarated by this freedom of language and his ability to name things at random. He usurps the role of the creator of logos and becomes mad with this power: he “names” a girl in a bar Fayaway and himself Herman Melville, recalling the naming of the narrator in Moby Dick (a book the narrator's wife had given him). When the narrator meets a vaguely familiar young man, he decides that this person will be Fanshawe: “This man was Fanshawe because I said he was Fanshawe” (152). The narrator is unable to retain his naming power, however, for the “Fanshawe” claims that his name is Peter Stillman (153). When the two men fight, they reenact the battle for identity between Black and Blue in Ghosts. This time the battle also suggests two texts, or versions of the story, grappling for supremacy. In accordance with the oscillating dominance of the “violent hierarchy,” the narrator loses the battle, getting pummeled by Stillman before blacking out.

In this same chapter, the narrator claims authorship of The New York Trilogy and reveals his own interpretation of the books: “These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about. I don't claim to have solved any problems. … The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle” (149). This “author,” who intrudes into his narrative to assert his intentions and conclusions, is also a self-undermining linguistic agent within the text. He offers a kind of closure to the puzzle of The New York Trilogy but undermines this solution by continuing the story in the following chapter.

The relationship between the narrator and Fanshawe is extremely complicated throughout The Locked Room. An examination of the “clues” invites us to infer that the narrator and Fanshawe are one and the same; if so, this person is the victim of the sort of quixotic conspiracy promoted by the writer Paul Auster in City of Glass. This solution is subverted in the last chapter of the story, in which the textual boundaries of the trilogy disintegrate: Fanshawe may also be Daniel Quinn, Peter Stillman, and Henry Dark, in accordance with the deconstructive denial of a single self. When the narrator is summoned by Fanshawe, he goes to the locked room in Boston expecting to find a presence outside of himself, a correspondence between his thoughts and external reality. (Significantly, Fanshawe summons the narrator in a letter, implying the possibility of correspondence.) The locked room in which Fanshawe “exists” is located on Columbus Street in Boston—place names associated with the discovery of a new Eden and with the founding fathers of this country. Fanshawe is thus associated with paternal authority, but he denies both his name and his presence to the narrator: they communicate through the door of the locked room.

In an ironic subversion of theistic authority and logocentrism, Fanshawe reveals that he is going to kill himself: “I've proved the point to myself. There's no need to go on with it. I'm tired. I've had enough” (174). The narrator blacks out and wakes up to darkness—the fallen world—holding the red notebook left behind by Fanshawe. The authority of logos is completely deconstructed in this paternal message to the narrator:

All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out. … Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. It is odd, then, that the feeling that survives from this notebook is one of great lucidity. It is as if Fanshawe knew his final work had to subvert every expectation I had for it. … He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again. I lost my way after the first word, and from then on I could only grope ahead, faltering in the darkness, blinded by the book that had been written for me. (178-79)

The red notebook illustrates Derrida's writing “sous rature”—writing under erasure, a ceaseless undoing and preserving of meaning. Even these words are suspect, however, the narrator tells us, leading him to destroy the paternal message: “One by one, I tore the pages from the notebook, crumpled them in my hand, and dropped them into a trash bin on the platform. I came to the last page just as the train was pulling out” (179).

Throughout The New York Trilogy, Auster parodies elements and motifs of the Romance in order to bare the formulaic expectations associated with this genre. According to Northrop Frye, in The Secular Scripture, “most romances exhibit a cyclical movement of descent into a night world and a return to the idyllic world.”¹⁰ Ostensibly, the failure to ascend or return characterizes a failed quest. Ironically, Auster's protagonists, by continually descending into darker and darker worlds, are freed from the tyranny of their logos-motivated quests. In Frye's mythological universe, based upon Judeo-Christian polarities of Heaven and Hell, “themes of descent are connected with the establishing of order, authority, and hierarchy.”¹¹ In The New York Trilogy, these concepts of power and control are repeatedly denied to each of the protagonists because they are logocentric ideals, the subjects of Auster's subversions. Quinn, Blue, and the narrator of The Locked Room are parodic romantic heroes. Like Don Quixote, they are all bewitched by books, especially books of a romantic nature: “Quinn had been a devoted reader of mystery novels. He knew that most of them were poorly written, that most could not stand up to even the vaguest sort of examination, but still, it was the form that appealed to him” (14); Blue is “a devoted reader of True Detective and tries never to miss a month” (16); the narrator of The Locked Room reads Moby Dick,Robinson Crusoe, and other travel-oriented books (24, 54, 85, 91).

Similarly, the themes and conventions associated with descent in Romance—confused identities, twins, doubles, and mirror images—appear repeatedly in the trilogy: in City of Glass, Quinn starts to follow Stillman but sees another man whose face is “the exact twin of Stillman's” (90); Blue, in spying on Black, feels as though he were “looking into a mirror” (20); the narrator of The Locked Room reads one of Fanshawe's stories, which hinges on “the confused identities of two sets of twins” (30). According to Frye, “[A]t the lower levels the Narcissus or twin image darkens into a sinister doppelganger figure, the hero's shadow and portent of his own death or isolation.”¹² Auster subverts this binary opposition characteristic of Romance by insisting upon a “both/and” oscillating movement: he denies romantic hierarchization by refusing to privilege permanently one term of an opposition over another. Blue is Black, for example, and also not Black.

The detective story is closely affiliated with the Romance (despite its “gritty” realism) through its solitary quest and in its emphasis on “reintegrating the existing order.”¹³ The detective in conventional fiction discovers “the truth,” but in the deconstructive anti-detective novel, “the inanity of the discovery is brought to its climax in the nonsolution, which unmasks a tendency toward disorder and irrationality that has always been implicit within detective fiction.”¹⁴ The lack of any one single solution leaves the narrator, and implied author, of the trilogy free to choose any or none of the potential solutions available to him; he is free to begin another quest in a new world full of possibilities.

The New York Trilogy is in many respects a travel narrative—a semantic journey through fictional space and an ontological voyage for a paradise of pure presence. The implied author of the trilogy, and perhaps Auster himself, crosses the boundaries of fictional zones to rediscover himself through self-exploration. In romantic literature, the hero often returns to his native land; in The New York Trilogy, the return to origin is impossible. Each volume serves as a trace or recording of the travel, and each concludes with a reference to other travels: at the end of City of Glass, the narrator claims to have just returned from Africa (201); at the end of Ghosts, the narrator says he likes to think of “Blue booking passage on some ship and sailing to China” (96); at the end of The Locked Room, the narrator stands on the platform waiting for a train (179).

The travel theme of the trilogy is reinforced through references to fictional, nonfictional, and imaginary travel narratives: Moby Dick, A. Gordon Pym, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, Raleigh's History of the World, The Journeys of Cabeza de Vaca, Peter Freuchen's Arctic Adventure, Marco Polo's Travels, Fanshawe's Neverland, and many others. The protagonists of these books, like those of The New York Trilogy, are exiles, pilgrims, and explorers who claim unknown regions through language. The traveler's attempt to name things and to decipher “signs” is also the function of the ontological voyager, for adventures only “exist” in language—when they are told or written down. Since language is unstable and it's meaning indeterminate, no place can be completely claimed or owned by its discoverer. The uncertainty of language also denies the self-exploring traveler access to an absolute origin, or self. As a travel narrative, The New York Trilogy is nomadic in nature: the semantic journey never ends but consists of a never-ending loop of arrivals and departures. The Chinese box structure of the trilogy offers vertical, as well as horizontal, travel. The references to historical texts allow travel through time as well as space, as does the trilogy's movement from present to past to present. This plurality of orientations results in endless shifting frames of references that continually deny any one locus, or “place,” of meaning for the infinite traveler.

Notes

1. Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1984).

2. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1978) 280.

3. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 27.

4. Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985; New York: Penguin, 1987) 15-16. Subsequent references are to this edition.

5. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern U P, 1973) 142-43.

6. Paul Auster, Ghosts (1986; New York: Penguin, 1987) 7, 9. Subsequent references are to this edition.

7. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1976) 65.

8. Derrida, Positions 41.

9. Paul Auster, The Locked Room (1986; New York: Penguin, 1988) 64. Subsequent references are to this edition.

10. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1976) 54.

11. Frye 182.

12. Frye 117.

13. Frye 138.

14. Tani 46.