QUEST FOR SELF IN THE NEW YORK TRIOLOGY

Abstract

The protagonist was born as Daniel Quinn and became a poet, playwright, essayist and translator. Then suddenly, he felt as if a part of him had died. He seems to lead a sort of a posthumous life, that has an amoeba-like character. The purpose of his changing identity is to empty his interior being and remain only on the surface of his invented characters. When he writes his mystery novels, he transforms into William Wilson, not a mere pen name but a separate personality for him. The Novel City of Glass is the first volume of The New York Trilogy. It treats identity under the cover of a single unit which critics call an anti-detective novel. One of them is Anne M. Holzapfel, who provides the following remark on the treatment of identity in the first part of the trilogy. “It is a traditional detective novel predominant quest-motif about the culprit’s identity shifts towards the question about the fake detective’s identity” (37).