This essay aims to examine Auster’s obsessive quests and urban spaces in a way which exceeds accepted definitions of the postmodern, metafictional detective story. Auster’s labyrinthine city thus appears as a liminal space which urges us to reconsider the mechanisms of cognition as well as of our ability to reflect upon the conditions which determine the acquisition of knowledge. City of Glass, its opening part, displays “an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps” (NYT 4) where the detective loses himself, fails to solve the mystery and is ultimately confronted with broader ontological and epistemological issues pertaining to the very nature of reality. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1987) is one of the most striking examples of the “anti-detective” or “metaphysical” detective story as described by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1999).
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