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Auster's City of Glass

Daniel Quinn, protagonist of Paul Auster’s novella City of Glass, is hired as a private investigator by a client who mistakenly believes that he is Paul Auster. When his case becomes too inscrutable, Quinn wonders if the “real” Auster might have any answers, and visits him. Quinn and the “Auster” character discuss the latter’s current writing project: an “imaginative reading” that determines the “true” origins of Don Quixote, or rather of “the book inside the book Cervantes wrote, the one he imagined he was writing” (116, 117). In other words, “Auster’s” analysis focuses not on the actual novel, but on the text Cervantes claimed he bought in a market and had translated into Spanish. Although other critics have noted that the structure of City of Glass parallels “Auster’s” dazzling yet convoluted exposition of the book inside Don Quixote,1 most have viewed this connection as little more than an entertaining diversion. However, closer examination reveals that “Auster’s” reading of Don Quixote is a key to our understanding of City of Glass. The “Auster” character recounts what Cervantes claims about Don Quixote: that he “discovered the manuscript by chance one day in the market at Toledo,” that it “was written in Arabic by Cid Hamete Benengeli,” and that Cervantes “presents himself as no more than the editor of the translation” (117). If this is the case, “Auster” muses, “who is Cid Hamete Benengeli?” Who wrote Don Quixote? “Auster’s” theory is that “he is actually a combination of four different people” (118): illiterate Sancho Panza dictates the story to two of Quixote’s friends, who give the story to Samson Carrasco, who translates it into Arabic. Cervantes finds this document and has it translated back into Spanish, possibly even by Don Quixote himself. Thus, Don Quixote has orchestrated the writing of his own narrative and makes sure the manuscript falls into Cervantes’s capable hands. According to “Auster,” Don Quixote does all this to test the limits of his listeners’ suspension of disbelief. “Auster” supposes that Don Quixote wanted to know “to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvious, isn’t it? To any extent” (120). Don Quixote’s experiment tests the power of fiction, generating the conclusion that an amusing fiction is far more compelling than the cold, hard truth. Although intriguing, these ideas at first seem irrelevant to a story about Daniel Quinn trying to protect his mysterious client. However, it becomes evident that the complex internal structure of Don Quixote is mirrored in City of Glass particularly as we try to unravel who has ostensibly written the latter narrative. In the “novella inside the novella,” Paul Auster makes an appearance that is described in third person. Indeed, the putative author of City of Glass is someone other than Auster himself; the narrative ends with that