The Wide Open Spaces of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

If detectives are sometimes described as exemplary readers, because they work with clues and signs to understand the true story of a crime, then the three detective stories in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy provide us with an interesting opportunity to study the nature of reading. In fact, this article will argue that, by tailing Auster’s detectives, we begin to see the difficulties the role of reader holds for us. Employing the theoretical works of Joseph Frank and Henri Lefebvre, we will see the parts that repetition, play, coincidence, the body, and betrayal have in the production and consumption of the text. Finally, it will be argued that, in equating an experience of the city with an experience of a text, The New York Trilogy provides us with an insight into the nature of textual spatiality, wherein one man stumbles after another, to find only himself in the end.