City of Glass is a postmodern example of how the traditional detective quest is transmuted into something more elusive and complex, as it is set in such a universe of “decentering chaos and non-solution” when Daniel Quinn, a writer of mystery novels who holds a “triad of selves” has been decoyed into a string of a very different kind from the one he actually contracted for. “It was a wrong number that started it”, the first line of the story, has implied that readers are going to be led to intricate interplays of a wilful confusion of facts and ungraspable mystery-mixed-reality. 

 

  While reading, one may encounter genuinely perplexing Quinn and spaces: the interrelation between an individual and the city. Quinn is a man strangely driven in his pursuit of nothingness; he is motivated by a nihilistic desire to disappear, a desire at least partially explained by the death of his wife and child years earlier in an accident. Interestingly, the panoramic spectacle of New York filtered through the gaze of Quinn represents a space of unbound possibility, which allows Quinn to evacuate the internal narratives of self, and occupy it instead with the external narratives of the city. His sense of emptiness and disorientation, leads to a feeling of “nowhere” in which Quinn leaves the world and his own identity behind. New York becomes an unfathomable expanse for Quinn. Hence, the city (New York), has been a site of solitude, fragmentation, mystery and multiple identities for the alienated individual, as Auster describes: 

 

New York, a city of impenetrable facades ... Everywhere it eludes the grasp, sealing itself off from the mind, forbidding the secret knowledge that would allow it to be defined… The city ... reduces its inhabitants to objects. Each person, entitled to just a single perspective, creates a city which is merely a function of his imagination.

 

  The facades of the buildings represent the impenetrable urban discourses, the remoteness of their ‘secret knowledge’ denies interpretation, and the rational logic of its street contains the imagination, making personal agency redundant. Here the streets themselves, the pattern they form and the buildings that flank them, represent the impenetrable ‘systemic’ discourses of metropolitan New York, admitting the personal and local experience of

New York’s real and symbolic facades merely to demonstrate their impenetrability. As Quinn hopes to remove himself from his past, his urban perambulation helps him escape his mind and eradicate thoughts and perhaps memories, “to be nowhere”. And the result is, the more he explores the city, the more he feels lost ‘within himself as well’. 

 

  The labyrinth of New York thus mirrors the confusion of Quinn’s own sense of self.  This spatial disorientation, nonetheless, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. City of Glass captures the deeply conflicted image of vertical New York as exciting and horizontal cityscape as frightening, strange and unhomely. “City” is not only a place where we flourish, but also a place where we can lose ourselves.