On City of Glass

In City of Glass, by Paul Auster, the main character, Quinn, comes to the end of himself.

This is how it's explained in the text. Whether you've read the book or not, those words will imply something to you. Without giving the game away (too much), let me sketch out what it meant for Quinn.

1. Quinn is something of a hermit: wrapped up in work, he has no friends and virtually no real need to connect with others.

2. By chance, he gets pulled into a strange, unpredictable series of events. When I say by chance, I mean that they appear to have been intended for someone else. Yet he becomes hopelessly enmeshed. When I say events, I mean mundane physical events that have enormous psychological repercussions.

3. A crisis occurs.

4. His response to the crisis is his ultimate undoing.

5. By the end of the book, there is no more Quinn. Quinn is lost even to the author of the story; the reader begins to wonder if he was ever real.

I'm no literary scholar. I haven't even read much Auster. But I want to suggest that this plotline could perhaps represent the greatest fear of many people.

In some part of our being, we continually walk a tightrope between being here, and not. Between some semblance of control, and a wild, enormous infinity in which we are completely lost -- not just to ourselves, or lost in the world, but actually nonexistent.

To exist, and to not exist at the same time is a strange paradox. If you don't exist, then neither does anything you thought you had: your feelings, experiences, and beliefs are entirely mutable. That store of memories that charts your education in life, entertains you on a cold night, and lets you believe during difficult times that things can be better is revealed as mere fabrication.

Yet the voice inside says you do exist. It insists this is so. It wants to believe in the memories, no matter how fantastical they seem, because they happened.

Didn't they?

Perhaps it's this drive which keeps us going: the tension between the will to exist (not just to live, but to be), and the reality of nonexistence.

In City of Glass, that tension is overwhelmed in favour of nonexistence not by any one individual, or a given course of action, but by a range of evidence that's complex, ubiquitous, and unavoidable.

Ultimately, Quinn's nonexistence is evinced by his life. His being finally dismisses his own actuality, and that's the end of him.