Space And Liminal Characters In Paul Auster’s City Of Glass

In the City of Glass,contemporary American writer Paul Auster depicts the desperation of liminal characters confronted with double hostilities—the chance beyond human control and the arbitrary connection between signifier and signified.The futile search of the liminal characters living outside the normalized social machine questions the possibility of establishing stable subjectivity and narrating the world with coherence through the existing traumatic language.By virtue of Victor Turner’s theory of liminality,this thesis takes space as the obje ct of study and seeks to reveal what changes the liminal characters go through,what spaces matter in their liminal processes,how they interact with the spaces and how their interactions with spaces affect their liminal processes.The thesis analyzes three liminal characters corresponding to three chapters respectively.Chapter one focuses on Daniel Quinn who transits from a detective to a suicide.His unstoppable obsession with denouement causes his degradation from a middle-class writer to a homeless bum.The spaces analyzed include personal space,public space,domestic space,etc.In different spaces,Quinn experiences different liminal moments.The change of the space corresponds with the identity change of the character.The shrinking of the space indicates the loss of his sanity and his hope of solving the mysterious case.His disappearance into the liminal space leads to the fact that absolute reason and certainty are fragile hallucinations.Chapter two elaborates on the previous criminal Peter Stillman Sr.who transits from a distinguished scholar to a madman.The key of the analysis lies in the relationship between his manipulation and transgression of space,and his immoderate patriarchal pulse to locate the origin and to recreate America.The manipulation of space is achieved through creating confined space,especially prison.The transgression goes in both horizontal and vertical ways,proving his alienation from the capitalist society.His death in the liminal space reveals the doom brought by his religious fever on God’s language,and extremist worship of signs.Chapter three presents the linguistically and mentally impaired man Peter Stillman Jr.—the victim of his father’s language-deprivation experiment.The analysis explores his permanent liminal state between nature and civilization caused and continued by spatial separation.Apart from normally-classified spaces like family space and social institutions,this thesis also divides the space related to him into pre-and post-linguistic spaces because he is banished from the social-symbolic order and unable to understand the world by common cognitive categorization.Stillman Jr.’s disappearance into liminal space strengthens Auster’s doubt about the ability of language to negotiate human with trauma and the shabby world.This thesis concludes that language has slipped into endless deferral and dissemination just like human has been caught in unpredictable chance and contingency.The absolute truth is a daydream but desperation is not the final solution.The only way to stabilize oneself in this changeable and transient world is to enter the third dimension between structure and post-structure—the liminal zone full of generative power and potential.This is where continuous meaning-making is possible,provisional satisfaction is available,and promising becoming is sustainable.