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Confused Conceptions of Identity in City of Glass and Erasure

In both Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Percival Everett’s Erasure, protagonists Daniel Quinn and Thelonius Monk find their identities threatened by extraneous circumstances. Quinn finds himself divided among multiple fictitious identities that he crafts in order to escape his own existence. Monk molds himself into a stereotype that once disgusted him, and both characters reveal a potential paradox about one’s identity: that individual identity relies solely on the perceptions of others who stare back at it.

Dan Quinn enters City of Glass, coincidentally, as a writer of fiction. We learn that Quinn no longer has a family, writes the occasional novel under the pen name “William Wilson,” and “long ago stopped considering himself as real” (Auster 9). Quinn lives solely through the identities he has crafted for himself, and such a lifestyle proves to be an escape mechanism for Quinn in an attempt to avoid the anguishing thoughts of his troubled past. Quinn, acting on an adventurous whim (and most likely acting as the fictional detective Max Work rather than himself), takes on the persona of Paul Auster as one of his artificial identities. To Quinn, Auster (the character) is “no more than a name to him, a husk without content,” and to be Auster thus “meant being a man with no interior, a man with no thoughts” (Auster 61). Quinn relies on playing the role of Auster, along with other characters such as Max Work and later Peter Stillman Jr., as a way to achieve “mindlessness.” By allowing the hollow persona of Auster to occupy Quinn’s mind with blankness, Quinn “drowns himself out of himself” so that he can “exert some small degree of control over his fits of despair” (Auster 61). Thus Quinn takes on false identities not for the sheer thrill but as a way to avoid his present despair inflicted by past memories. In coping with anguish, Quinn, rather than confronting the source of the anguish, always finds a means to avert it. When Quinn feels himself lusting after Virginia Stillman after feeling “his loneliness more keenly” than usual, “pleasant diversions” of picturing Virginia naked each keep him content. Again, Quinn turns to fictitious fantasies—conjured realities without content—to keep his mind at ease. Eventually Quinn’s reliance on others’ identities will lead Quinn finding himself consciously morphing into the character of Peter Stillman, Jr. After purchasing his red notebook to record his thoughts so “things might not get out of control,” Quinn reverberates Stillman’s paradoxical language: “My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name” (Auster 40). Quinn, like the young Stillman, finds no intrinsic value to names; Quinn can just as easily call himself William Wilson or Max Work, as they are nothing more than different faces on the same empty husk of an identity. Whether Quinn finds himself living out of a dark room in complete isolation by the end of the story is a mere coincidence or not, we cannot help but tie Quinn’s state to that of Stillman’s adolescence as a child raised without language or any contact from the outside world. But this connection, be it a coincidence or not, allows an inquiry to be made about the nature of individual identity and the paradox of its truth. We learn from the narrator that “although Quinn in many ways continued to exist, he no longer existed for anyone but

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himself” (Auster 4). Just as Stillman once lived without any connection to the outside world, the only person aware of the real Daniel Quinn’s existence (not Quinn as Auster or Wilson, but Quinn as Quinn) is Daniel Quinn. And because of this complete disconnection from the rest of the world, Quinn finds himself lost in the empty shells of false identities. Daniel Quinn cannot stand alone as Daniel Quinn, as the world outside of Quinn’s mind knows Quinn only as the other identities he has relentlessly crafted for himself. Thus individual identity relies firmly on the external world to establish itself as a body strong enough to stand on its own. Because nobody knows Daniel Quinn as Daniel Quinn, Quinn can only continue to survive through the false identity of others. Once Quinn “cancels out” the empty personas of William Wilson, Auster, and Stillman, he must go back into the world, leaving behind the red notebook, now nothing more “than a bridge to another place in his life” that has lost its meaning (Auster 128). Does Monk face a similar identity crisis in Erasure? Unlike Quinn’s character, we have no reason to question Monk’s sanity. But Monk still faces a dilemma with regard to his personal identity because of the stereotypes American culture places on Monk and his work as an African-American novelist. Although Monk bluntly states that he “doesn’t believe in race,” dominant, white-American culture forces Monk to invest in an idea of race and, consequently, the divide between literature and African-American literature (Everett 2). Everyone places Monk into the widespread black stereotype (a lower-income, Ebonics-speaking criminal with a bunch of illegitimate children), from Monk’s agent who tells Monk his work will not sell because he is “not black enough,” to his fellow Book Award judge, who tells Monk that he should be happy that “his people” are so vividly portrayed in My Pafology (Everett 43, 261). Monk is a puzzle piece being forced to fit the wrong spot, and mainstream culture is the assembler of the puzzle. But Monk proves to be a puzzle all to his own, and the constant feeling of being forced into a stereotype he does not fit leaves Monk feeling “out of place,” as if he “didn’t belong” (Everett 21). So where does Monk feel his true identity lies in? There is no exact answer to this question, but that a clear-cut answer cannot be supplied illustrates that Monk faces the same dilemma Quiin encounters in City of Glass: Monk begins to question his own established identity as he struggles to find a proper place in the world. Monk is not a writer of “black literature,” but also finds himself disconnected from the avant-garde community. And all of those who once understood—or at least accepted—Monk as an eccentric scholar and fiction writer are slowly starting to leave his life. Just as Quinn felt unreal to the world after those who once knew him as Daniel Quinn have all left him, Monk faces the same threat of losing his true identity.

Monk’s vulnerability will lead him to create Stagg R. Leigh and My Pafology, two products of Monk’s indulgence in wearing the black stereotype that everyday life has bombarded him with for so long. In her article “Race Under Erasure,” Margaret Russett claims that Monk writes My Pafology out of his frustration toward Juanita Mae Jenkin’s overly offensive bestseller, We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, and that Monk writes My Pafology “ostensibly” as a parody. I can only partially agree with Russet; Monk tells his agent that My Pafology is a parody, but never clarifies with such information once the public

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accepts the plot of the novel at face value. Instead, Monk refuses to intervene and My Pafology consequently thrives as a “true” African American novel (Everett 261). Ironically, Monk decides to create My Pafology directly after reflecting on what he considered to be his only “real” novel (meaning the novel he had written that was considered “black literature” by the public), a novel that “was received nicely and sold rather well” (Everett 61). Such a juxtaposition of events is no coincidence—Monk turns to creating “real” African-American literature in an attempt to force himself into an identity that the rest of the world generally accepts. We see Monk “screaming” and “complaining” that he does not speak in stereotypical black dialect just before he crafts My Pafology (Everett 62). Frustrated with being misunderstood and pigeonholed as a “black” writer, Monk gives up on trying to be the eccentric, race-free writer that can find no place in the literary world. By forfeiting his original identity, Monk—much like Quinn—must craft an identity that will fit into the black stereotype and thus be accepted by the general public. Stagg Leigh and My Pafology are the remedies to such a dilemma, and Monk must now wear “the mask of the person [he] was expected to be” (Everett 212). The novel concludes with Monk and Leigh coming together as one single identity, and we are left to wonder who’s name will be on the next novel: Thelonius Monk or Stagg Leigh?