City Of Gray Character Analysis

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What we can infer from this description is that he does not belong to this world, he is not comfortable in it because he has lost all what he had in life, his wife and his son, so he is a lonely and isolated figure who will wander (as we will see later on) through the streets of NY in search of his identity, in search of a place in this miserable world. If we compare this characteristic of our protagonist with the classic detective, we realize that both of them share the characteristic of isolation, they are figures who do not belong to the world "they have to live", as we see in :" The world was outside of him (Quinn), around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for …show more content…

In addition both of them have some vices, smoking in Quinn's case, as we find many references to cigarettes in the novel: "Quinn lay in bed smoking a cigarette (City of Glass, pg.20), " He decided to light a cigarette" (City of Glass, pg.29), " Quinn shrugged, took out a cigarette" (City of Glass, pg.39) Furthermore, Quinn does not have any friends, he has no relationship with anybody, he is living a depressing life, so that this is the reason why Auster states the next: "It is as if he were living a posthumous life" (City of Glass, pg.19) Finally to end up with this idea, I would like to say that before starting the "investigation", the only connection Quinn has with the real world is the pseudonym "William Wilson" under which he publishes his works, as Lisa Forsberg says in her article " The Internal Conflict of Identity in Paul Auster‟s City of Glass and Ghosts": "from the very beginning, writing under a pseudonym was the only thing of substance in Quinn's life, the only connection to the world outside of himself" (Lisa Forsberg,

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