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. He records every detail about the case in the red notebook and even writes while following Stillman. The text emphasizes that investigation, whether through writing or detecting, rests on the assumption that “human behavior [can] be understood” (67). However, the intertextual references to Don Quixote in Quinn’s conversation with Paul Auster raise questions about the writer’s ability to interpret human behavior. Nonetheless, writing remains Quinn’s only solace to the very end. Even when answers seem impossible, Quinn continues writing in the red notebook in a desperate attempt to find meaning.

Ghosts, a highly symbolic story, reverses the writer/detective trope. Blue is a detective whose role shifts when he undertakes White’s case. Blue becomes entangled into the literary project by isolating himself and watching Black read and write. As a detective, he attempts to understand the writer’s purpose and unlock the mysteries of literature. In the process, he ventures into storytelling himself. As the case makes no sense to Blue, he devises stories and writes them in a notebook to help him think of possible interpretations. The text highlights the importance of the inner self as the center of literary exploration. Blue’s newfound solitude leads him to introspection, realizing that “the world inside him” is “unexplored” and “dark” (145). Blue disguises himself to approach Black, like an undercover spy and simultaneously like a writer approaching a character. Blue becomes obsessed with understanding Black, and his desire to read Black’s book signifies his own attempt to comprehend the human condition, reality, and the self.

In The Locked Room, the writer’s role dominates. The narrator writes articles but aspires to write fiction. He transforms into a detective when he attempts to write Fanshawe’s biography. Fanshawe’s character has always fascinated the narrator, and now he becomes his literary subject. The narrator begins an investigation, examining Fanshawe’s letters, traveling to Paris, searching for clues and facts about his life: “I was a detective after all, and my job was to hunt for clues” (283). Again, the narrator’s quest is to understand another person and discover the reason for his disappearance. In the end, the narrator’s only clue is a red notebook, and Fanshawe’s writing is the only way he can access the man.