A Thread Of Manipulation & Staged Chance. An interpretation of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

Abstract

This essay makes sense of a confusing book that resists interpretation by putting the three novels in the trilogy into context with one another. The main idea is that they are all one and the same story told from different perspectives of a sole author turning the six main protagonists in only two. The New York Trilogy is an “anti-detective” mystery novel where three detectives struggle to make sense of their situations which are surrounded by what seems to be chance events. The contention of the essay is that the detectives are going through an identity crisis leading them to imagine that the objects of their chase have set them up through elaborate manipulations. However as the stories are narrated by the partial detectives they cannot be trusted as completely accurate as they are only told from their point of view.