Exploration of Identity and Reality in Auster's "The New York Trilogy"

"The New York Trilogy" is a trilogy written by the American author Paul Auster, which includes the following novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room. The trilogy was published in 1987.

New York as a Protagonist

In this Trilogy, New York is an inexhaustible and frenetic carousel that shapes reality making it claustrophobic. Immersing yourself in these three stories means going into the most murky and dark meanders of the human psyche: the skyscrapers bite much of the scenery while the main characters wander through a huge variety of streets and neighborhoods, trapped inside something dark and indefinable.

The Search for Identity

Within these three stories everyone is a detective, everyone is looking for something while everything around it is spinning. The protagonists abandon their own dimension, detach themselves from the wake of their life to follow the shadow of enigmatic and mysterious secondary characters.

The center of the narrative is the human being, who is represented in his moments of greater loss and avulsion from the world, lost in search of hi

mself, walking through dark and haunted streets.


The Narrative Flow

The narrative flow is littered with pitfalls, as the character gets lost in more or less real whirlwinds, the reader experiences a sense of emptiness and a crumbling of the initial perceived cornerstones.


It is not easy to represent the sense of annihilation, dissatisfaction and continuous research that pushes man to escape from the boundaries of his family and social life, yet Auster succeeds in his stories sometimes surreal, bizarre, out of the common canons that we could to be accustomed.


American Literary Style

The work is representative of the American literary style of today, where the human figure is split into being and wanting to be, between real and imaginary, where the moral theme becomes a battlefield between right and wrong.