Searching for identity: The mutual projection of the ‘postlapsarian’ protagonist and his environment in Paul Auster’s "City of Glass"

This essay argues that Daniel Quinn, the protagonist of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, has a multiple personality reflected by the other characters of the novel as well as by the city. Referring to De Certeau, I will deal with the city as a text which the subject tries to read and write in search of his own identity. After displaying his relationship to the novel’s most important figures and the way in which his own personality is projected on them, I will show that Quinn himself is a fallen creature: he does not have an identity since the breach between “signifier” and “signified” cannot be overcome, just like in ‘postlapsarian’ language.