Open City

“And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.”

The opening line of the novel sets up the theme of Physical and Mental Wandering. It also establishes the novel as a character study of the unreliable narrator, Julius.

“And again, the empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster.”

Here, Julius establishes that the novel exists in a post-9/11 world, later revealing the year to be 2007. The literary device of the metonym means something standing in for something else. In this case, the absence of the twin towers metonymically represents the terrorist attack.

“Blacks, ‘we blacks’ had known rougher ports of entry [...] This was the acknowledgement he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every ‘brother’ he met.”

This is one example of how Black people in New York City, like his cab driver and post office worker, try to connect with Julius, who sees his identity has fundamentally different from theirs in that he grew up in Nigeria and his family was not directly affected by the slave trade.