The New York Trilogy

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.