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49 pages 1 hour read

Paul Auster

The New York Trilogy

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

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Important Quotes

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“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. The reader sees the world though the detective’s eye, experiencing the proliferation of its detail as if for the first time. He has become awake to the things around him, as if they might speak to him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence.”


(Book 1, Chapter 1, Page 8)

The passage aligns the role of the detective with the writer. It indicates the trilogy’s core theme of The Writer as an Investigator of The Human Condition. The writer is an inspector of reality, paying attention to the details of human behavior and reflecting on life’s events and changes. Writing is a means of coherence, a way to find meaning into the chaos of human existence. This passage also justifies the author’s genre choice. Auster employs a specific genre and effectively justifies his own literary intentions.

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“Quinn was used to wandering. His excursions through the city had taught him to understand the connectedness of the inner and outer. Using aimless motion as a technique of reversal, on his best days he could bring the outside in and thus usurp the sovereignty of inwardness. By flooding himself with externals, by drowning himself out of himself, he had managed to exert some small degree of control over his fits of despair. Wandering, therefore, was a kind of mindlessness.”


(Book 1, Chapter 8, Page 61)

For Quinn, walking around New York is a means of escape. New York reinforces the character’s isolation by disrupting his inner self. As a postmodern space, New York contributes to the fragmentation of identity. Quinn finds solace in being lost in the city streets and control his inner thoughts.

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“Quinn was deeply disillusioned. He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny. The more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics, and silences, there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation.”


(Book 1, Chapter 8, Page 67)

The passage reflects the writer’s impulse to interpret life and reality. By observing and recording every detail about the Stillman case, Quinn hopes to find meaning and connection among absurd and random events. Although Quinn gathers all available clues, he cannot find any meaning in the Stillman case. For him, reality remains mysterious and inaccessible and so does human behavior.

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“A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little, these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. They have not adapted themselves to the new reality. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. It’s made a mess of everything. But words, as you yourself understand, are capable of change.”


(Book 1, Chapter 9, Page 77)

In this quote, Stillman explains the reasoning behind his linguistic experiment. The text reflects on the theme of The Limitations of Language and Life’s Absurdity as Stillman argues on the failure of words to provide a cohesive meaning in a fragmented reality. In the postmodern world, identities remain fluid; therefore language fails to convey the essence of the inner self.

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“I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap.”


(Book 1, Chapter 9, Page 78)

New York as the setting in City of Glass emphasizes the issue of identity loss. As a postmodern space, New York is a multicultural, multinational metropolis that limits the possibilities of introspection and distinct identities. As the background in the trilogy, it contributes to the text’s exploration of identity and language.

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“Quinn had always thought of himself as a man who liked to be alone. For the past five years, in fact, he had actively sought it. But it was only now, as his life continued in the alley, that he began to understand the true nature of solitude. He had nothing to fall back on anymore but himself. And of all the things he discovered during the days he was there, this was the one he did not doubt: that he was falling.”


(Book 1, Chapter 12, Page 118)

Quinn reaches a turning point in his quest, as the character faces his own demise. His obsession with the Stillman case leads him to total despair and to a loss of self. In this quote, solitude is no longer an escape, but represents Quinn’s internal condition. He remains disconnected from the world with no other resort but his own fragmented thoughts.

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“This period of growing darkness coincided with the dwindling of pages in the red notebook. Little by little, Quinn was coming to the end. At a certain point, he realized that the more he wrote the sooner the time would come when he could no longer write anything. He began to weigh his words with great care, struggling to express himself as economically and clearly as possible.”


(Book 1, Chapter 13, Page 131)

The passage represents writing as Quinn’s only solution. Even to the point of total despair, Quinn continues his quest of meaning-making. Quinn’s project has finished but the story remains open-ended.

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“Nevertheless, he tried to face the end of the red notebook with courage. He wondered if he had it in him to write without a pen, if he could learn to speak instead, filling the darkness with his voice, speaking the words into the air, into the walls, into the city, even if the light never came back again. The last sentence of the red notebook reads: ‘What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?’”


(Book 1, Chapter 13, Page 132)

The quote contains the red notebook motif that connects to storytelling. The desire for stories reaches beyond language, as Quinn wishes that he could have another means other than writing to continue his story. The possibility of not being able to continue the story torments him but he accepts the end of the red notebook. Ultimately, the passage alludes to the constant desire for stories and highlights the theme of Storytelling as an Endless Struggle.

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“For to watch someone read and write is in effect to do nothing. The only way for Blue to have a sense of what is happening is to be inside Black’s mind, to see what he is thinking, and that of course is impossible.”


(Book 2, Page 141)

Blue realizes that the solution to the case is to enter Black’s thoughts. The quote indicates that literature can capture only part of human life, as the mystery lies in the inner self. The human mind remains impenetrable; therefore it invites constant exploration.

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“Until now, Blue has not had much chance of sitting still, and this new idleness has left him at something of a loss. For the first time in his life, he finds that he has been thrown back on himself, with nothing to grab hold of, nothing to distinguish one moment from the next. He has never given much thought to the world inside him, and though he always knew it was there, it has remained an unknown quantity, unexplored and therefore dark, even to himself.”


(Book 2, Page 145)

This quote represents a turning point for Blue, as his character begins to transform. Blue changes through his constant surveillance of Black, whose main activities are reading and writing. Trying to make sense of Black, Blue also turns inward. He begins to realize his own self is unknown to him. The text represents the inner self as the most mysterious part of human existence.

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“Blue sets his typewriter on the table and casts about for ideas, trying to apply himself to the task at hand. He thinks that perhaps a truthful account of the past week would include the various stories he had made up for himself concerning Black. With so little else to report, these excursions into the make-believe would at least give some flavor of what has happened. But Blue brings himself up short, realizing that they have nothing really to do with Black. This isn’t the story of my life, after all, he says. I’m supposed to be writing about him, not myself.”


(Book 2, Page 149)

Blue is a detective who turns to writing. As the real facts offer no insight into Black’s case, Blue turns to the imagination. Lacking possible interpretations, Blue resorts to storytelling to make sense of Black’s character. Ultimately, storytelling is a means for Blue not to solve the case but to gain access to himself.

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“As he reads over the results, he is forced to admit that everything seems accurate. But then why does he feel so dissatisfied, so troubled by what he has written? He says to himself: what happened is not really what happened. For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say.”


(Book 2, Page 149)

Even though Blue has written all details and facts about Black, his notes seem meaningless. The quotation illustrates the theme of the limitations of language and life’s absurdity, as words cannot delineate any explanation on Black’s actions. Language fails to convey the true meaning of the situation.

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“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. This is strange enough—to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.”


(Book 2, Pages 171-172)

The passage reflects on the writer’s life. The writing process demands an understanding of the other, an interpretation of human existence and of life’s unpredictable course. For Blue, this signals his disconnection from the outer world, and a turn into the mystery of the inner self.

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“‘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.’ ‘Another ghost.’ ‘Exactly.’ ‘Sounds mysterious.’”


(Book 2, Page 178)

This quotation contains key elements of the trilogy’s narrative. The text connects solitude to the writer’s life. A writer can lose himself in the process of immersing himself in other people’s lives. In the end, his characters become part of his own identity.

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“For Blue at this point can no longer accept Black’s existence, and therefore he denies it. Having penetrated Black’s room and stood there alone, having been, so to speak, in the sanctum of Black’s solitude, he cannot respond to the darkness of that moment except by replacing it with a solitude of his own. To enter Black, then, was the equivalent of entering himself, and once inside himself, he can no longer conceive of being anywhere else.”


(Book 2, Page 192)

Blue accepts that Black’s case resists interpretations and explanations. His invasion of Black’s room symbolizes Blue’s attempt to enter his inner thoughts. By exploring Black’s mind, Blue encounters the human self and confronts the loneliness of introspection. Once inside himself, Blue cannot escape.

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“Fanshawe’s gesture had opened up a whole new world for me: the way someone could enter the feelings of another and take them on so completely that his own were no longer important.”


(Book 3, Chapter 2, Page 213)

This passage reiterates the author’s argument about the writer’s ability to enter another human character by identifying with them. The narrator learns through Fanshawe that writing is a means of understanding human existence.

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“Given the strain of reconciling myself to the project, it was probably necessary for me to equate Fanshawe’s success with my own. I had stumbled onto a cause, a thing that justified me and made me feel important, and the more fully I disappeared into my ambitions for Fanshawe, the more sharply I came into focus for myself.”


(Book 3, Chapter 3, Page 233)

The narrator of The Locked Room lacks the creativity to write fiction; therefore publishing Fanshawe’s literary work provides him with a sense of purpose. He starts to identify with Fanshawe to the point that he takes over his life. By equating his life with Fanshawe’s, the narrator finds a way into himself.

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“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. My only hope is that there is an end to what I am about to say, that somewhere I will find a break in the darkness. This hope is what I define as courage, but whether there is reason to hope is another question entirely.”


(Book 3, Chapter 4, Page 237)

This quote is the narrator’s appeal to the reader, a metafictional element that explains the narrative’s purposes. It alludes to the stories’ endings that remain open-ended and the protagonists’ desperate attempts to find meaning, even when they know they are approaching the end. Ultimately, the trilogy’s unsolved mysteries allude to the nature of storytelling. One story never provides a sufficient interpretation of the human condition, therefore people’s desire for new stories is continual. The trilogy’s stories invite other stories, in a constant struggle for meaning.

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“We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. 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.”


(Book 3, Chapter 5, Page 249)

In this passage, the author analyzes the human desire for storytelling. People’s quest for stories is driven by the need to understand the human mind. Through stories, people imagine themselves as others, and see the world through other eyes. For the narrator, this imagining is an illusion. People struggle to understand others due to their primary inability to understand themselves. The quotation emphasizes Auster’s main argument that the inner self is an unsolvable mystery.

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“It had become a private matter for me, something no longer connected to writing. All the research for the biography, all the facts I would uncover as I dug into his past, all the work that seemed to belong to the book—these were the very things I would use to find out where he was. […] I was piecing together the story of a man’s life.”


(Book 3, Chapter 7, Page 269)

The narrator’s thoughts indicate that the desire for stories can reach beyond language. After undertaking the project of Fanshawe’s biography, the narrator becomes obsessed with the man himself. He loses interesting in writing about Fanshawe and the book is no longer meaningful to him. His main goal is to make sense of Fanshawe’s life, and to create a cohesive whole out of the fragments of Fanshawe’s past.

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“I was a detective, after all, and my job was to hunt for clues. 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.”


(Book 3, Chapter 7, Page 283)

The theme of the writer as an investigator of the human condition becomes apparent as the text reiterates the connection between the writer and the detective. The narrator takes up the role of the detective, hunting for clues and witnesses to learn about Fanshawe’s life. Again, reality is portrayed as fragmented and chaotic, an onslaught of “random information” the narrator struggles to make sense of.

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“Thoughts stop where the world begins, I kept telling myself. But the self is also in the world, I answered, and likewise the thoughts that come from it. The problem was that I could no longer make the right distinctions. This can never be that. Apples are not oranges, peaches are not plums. You feel the difference on your tongue, and then you know, as if inside yourself.”


(Book 3, Chapter 8, Page 290)

As Fanshawe remains elusive, the narrator loses himself in his thoughts and gradually feels disconnected from reality. The passage interrogates the connection between the inner self and the outer world, with language described as an uneasy link between the two.

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“At best, there was one impoverished image: the door of a locked room. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mythical solitude—living perhaps, breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull.”


(Book 3, Chapter 8, Pages 292-293)

The passage refers to the symbolic dimension of the story’s title, relating the idea of the locked room to the writer’s brain. The narrator imagines Fanshawe as an isolated figure, a writer enclosed in a small room leading an inaccessible inner life. As the narrator enters the room, he also enters his own inner self. The locked room also alludes to City of Glass and Ghosts, where the protagonists isolate themselves in a small room.

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“The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. 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. […] I have been struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters. The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle.”


(Book 3, Chapter 8, Page 294)

Toward the end of The Locked Room, the theme of storytelling as an endless struggle prevails and describes the trilogy’s metafictional dimension. The narrator reveals himself as the author of the three stories and explains his writing intentions. He explains that the stories are interconnected, all variations of one main narrative. The narrator struggles to release himself from the story and accept that the book will remain open-ended. Finally, storytelling is described as a desire beyond words and a perpetual human quest to make sense of life.

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“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.”


(Book 3, Chapter 9, Page 313)

The narrator struggles to find meaning until the end. Like Quinn and Blue, he remains all alone with the words. The red notebook motif recurs as a structural tool that connects the trilogy, and alludes to the limitations of literature. Even though the narrator enjoys the beauty of Fanshawe’s writing, the notebook cannot provide him with answers, alluding again to the theme of Storytelling as a Constant Struggle. A story can only raise further questions and thus remains unfinished, inviting other stories to continue the quest for understanding.

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