Who says? Problematic narration in Paul Auster’s City of glass
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Annjeanette Wiese
Abstract
The conventions of narratological categories direct our expectations and interpretation as we read. But when these conventions are problematized, our interpretation becomes more theoretical, forcing us to contemplate why an author would choose to experiment with the category of, for example, narration. In Paul Auster’s City of glass (1985), we have what appears to be a heterodiegetic, omniscient narrator who is mostly, but not fully, unproblematic. By the end, however, we discover that this narrator is (also?) homodiegetic. Auster’s breaking of the rules of traditional narration by having a narrator who is both hetero- and homodiegetic not only leaves readers in a quandary as to how to interpret the text, it also makes us realize how much we rely on the narrator for meaning. I propose to analyze the novel in order to explore the rhetorical strategy of Auster’s refusal to maintain a stable narrator. This analysis will illustrate how the category of narration prompts an unexamined trust in the teller and is therefore essential for our understanding of truth and meaning in narrative. I contend, in other words, that Auster’s experimentation with the category of narration in City of glass is key to the text’s insistence on a revised understanding of truth.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Introduction: Experimental literature and narrative theory
- Perturbatory narration in literature und film
- Blocks to, and building blocks of, narrativity: Fragments, anecdotes, and narrative lines in David Markson’s Reader’s block
- Eighteen hours of salmon: On the narrativity of slow TV
- A “fucked up” novel, narratology, and the Difference approach to literary fiction
- Framing absence: A narratology of the empty page
- “Both close and distant”: Experiments of form and the medieval in contemporary literature
- Who says? Problematic narration in Paul Auster’s City of glass
- The Eventfulness of Non-Events in Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.”
- Fantastic reversals of time: Representations of ageing in the fantastic mode
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Introduction: Experimental literature and narrative theory
- Perturbatory narration in literature und film
- Blocks to, and building blocks of, narrativity: Fragments, anecdotes, and narrative lines in David Markson’s Reader’s block
- Eighteen hours of salmon: On the narrativity of slow TV
- A “fucked up” novel, narratology, and the Difference approach to literary fiction
- Framing absence: A narratology of the empty page
- “Both close and distant”: Experiments of form and the medieval in contemporary literature
- Who says? Problematic narration in Paul Auster’s City of glass
- The Eventfulness of Non-Events in Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.”
- Fantastic reversals of time: Representations of ageing in the fantastic mode
