The New York Trilogy

Auster employs the detective genre to interrogate the role of the writer and the relationship between the literary project and the world. In all three stories, the writer and the detective overlap, reinforcing Auster’s purpose of deconstructing detective fiction and exploring the nature of writing. Each novel treats a case as a situation that resists solution and interpretation. The writer as a detective is a man trying to make sense of the world and find meaning by observing human behavior. In City of Glass, Auster explicitly connects the writer to the detective:

The detective is the 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 (8).

This idea permeates all three novels. In City of Glass, Daniel Quinn is a writer of mystery novels who decides to impersonate a detective due to a random event—a wrong phone call. His impulse as a writer is to investigate the Stillman case and understand the real story behind it. His pleasure in impersonating another man reflects the idea of the writer’s identification with fictional characters, and he approaches the case like a writer.