CHAOS AND COMPLEXITY IN PAUL AUSTERS

NEW YORK TRILOGY

GINGER JONES AND KEVIN ELLS

Many are familiar with Ezra Pounds remark that artists are the antennae
of the race and with Freuds comment that writers and philosophers
discovered the unconscious long before he did. British critic Harriet
Hawkins agrees that literary artists do anticipate patterns later explicated
more formally in other fields by suggesting that if we look at chaos from
an artistic angle, chaos in nature (as in art) likewise may be seen to
serve a higher order as a creative force that may produce beauty,
freedom, and growth as well as catastrophe.1 Literary critics may
therefore interpret the depiction of events in particular works of literature
as an artistic response, perhaps unconscious or preconscious, to the same
social, political, and technological milieus that chaos theory attempts to
explain in mathematical language.
Few contemporary writers have explored the themes of chaos,
complexity, and randomness with as much depth and breadth as the
American novelist Paul Auster. In novel after novel, Auster depicts how,
moving in time to the music of chance the play of random events
not just the lives but also the identities of characters may be thrown into
chaos, a complex state that at a certain point emerges, that is to say,
spontaneously organizes itself into a new stable system. This is not chaos
in the everyday sense of the word, but as defined in a technical sense in
chaos theory and complexity theory as random behaviour on the surface
masking an underlying structural order. Roger Lewin writes that
physicist Murray Gell-Mann has a good phrase for it: Surface
complexity arising out of deep simplicity.2 Lewin himself calls it
global properties arising from local interaction,3 identifying the edge of
1
Harriet Hawkins, Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture, and Chaos Theory, New
York, 1995, 4.
2
Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, New York, 1993, 14.
3
Ibid., 152.

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Ginger Jones and Kevin Ells

chaos as a place of maximum capacity of information computation where

complex systems adapt, honing the efficiency of their rules as they go:4
A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity
persisted in the face of small disturbances.5 Who cannot recall a
relationship, or person, described by that definition?
It is difficult to argue, though not necessary to determine, whether this
is a paradigm emerging in multiple disparate fields at a particular
cultural-historical period, or whether, as with many other areas, fiction
created or contributed to the paradigm (the flashbacks, cuts and shifts in
focus of cinema as anticipated in fiction being one example), or whether
Auster was as acutely sensitive to developments in his culture as were
poets such as Walt Whitman or John Ashbery. The fact remains that Paul
Austers New York Trilogy, containing the three novels that comprised
the first work Auster published under his own name, demonstrates that
Austers vision of the world corresponds closely with the fundamental
tenets of chaos theory and complexity theory (the latter explains in more
detail how an organization or network of elements adapts to an unstable
environment). Despite the extreme unlikelihood that Auster deliberately
set out to dramatize the tenets of chaos and complexity in The New York
Trilogy, the perspective of these theories is explicit throughout this work,
and critics can easily discern throughout it several instances in which a
characters identity is altered from one fundamental state (collapse,
stagnation, bifurcation, chaos) to another, or may persist, complexly, to
the edge of chaos, before emerging into something wholly new.
The New York Trilogy consists of three interlocked narratives, City of
Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, each of which reiterates the drama
of a sole unnamed protagonist who survives the disintegration and
achieves the reintegration of his sense of identity. Because the fact that
each novel is a separate iteration of the same story is not made explicit
by Auster until well into the third novel, the trilogys structure as a single
story in three long sections would not have been at all obvious to original
readers of the novels (published separately in the two years prior to the
publication of The New York Trilogy in a single volume in 1987), but not
particularly important to those readers, either, since each part of the
trilogy stands on its own as a self-contained and internally consistent, if
unconventional, narrative. However, early readers would have noticed
that each of this unusual new American novelists early novels depicted a
4
5

Ibid., 54-55.
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, New York, 1987, 48.

Chaos and Complexity in The New York Trilogy

629

largely self-appointed detective concerned as much with the solution of

existential puzzles as material ones. Readers would have been less likely
to notice that Austers trilogy explicitly dramatizes four fundamental
concepts (the butterfly effect, strange attractors, iteration, and
emergence) of chaos theory, itself first brought to the attention of the
general reader only in 1987 by the science writer James Gleick in his
Chaos: Making a New Science.
The first clear resonance between the tenets of chaos and complexity
and the work of Paul Auster might seem too obvious to bear mention, but
reviewing it will lead quickly into other resemblances Austers early
work bears to chaos and complexity concepts. The principle of sensitive
dependence on initial conditions, discovered (appropriately enough, by
chance, during an early effort at forecasting the weather through
computerized models) by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the early
1960s, and popularized by Lorenz himself as the butterfly effect, is the
catalyst of all Austers narratives.
The butterfly effect takes its name in part through Lorenzs own oftrepeated and frequently cited meteorological analogy of a butterfly in
Brazil flapping its wings so that ultimately a tornado is set off in Texas.
Less well known are Lorenzs reminders that for every butterfly setting
off a storm, we may imagine another butterfly stopping one, making the
long-term behaviour of any complex system, from the meteorological to
the sociological, impossible to forecast. From a glance at our own
unwritten biographies, many of us can attest what Auster the writer
seems to feel in his bones namely, that there are a lot of butterflies out
there.
Now, anyone who happens upon a video tape or a screening of The
Music of Chance, a film adapted from Austers novel of the same name,
or the film Smoke, co-written by Auster, will surely think the discovery
of the butterfly effect in Auster is about as groundbreaking a subject for
an essay as the discovery of sexual tension in Alfred Hitchcocks films.
But we find several additional resonances between chaos theory and The
New York Trilogy, including the concepts of strange attractors, iteration,
and emergence, which we will discuss in turn.
Briefly, each novel of The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts,
and The Locked Room) begins as do many Auster stories with the
irruption of a random event in the life of a protagonist that precipitates a
chain of circumstances leading to the protagonists loss of identity. To
lose ones identity is to accept the lightness of becoming the other, of

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being on the surface with no inner thoughts, while the burden of your
own consciousness gets forgotten, writes Dragana Nikolic:
Certain conclusions about [the actions of Austers characters] cannot be
drawn: they have no centre nor stable identity. The only consolation left
to Austers subject is to reinvent himself: Uncle Victor says in Moon
Palace that every person is the author of his own life.6

The narrator of City of Glass begins the chronicle of the private

detective Quinns dissolving identity by announcing that it was a wrong
number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of
night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
The narrator goes on to say that much later, when [Quinn] was able to
think about the things that had happened to him, he would conclude that
nothing was real except chance.7 In the first paragraph of Ghosts, we
read how another private detective identified only as Blue goes to his
office everyday and sits at his desk, waiting for something to happen. For
a long time nothing does, and then a man named White walks through
the door, and that is how it begins. 8
Finally, in The Locked Room, a freelance writer recalls an influential
childhood friend, Fanshawe, whom he had let go of.9 After years of
having no contact with Fanshawe or his family, the writer-narrator
suddenly receives a letter from Fanshawes wife, a letter that caused a
series of little shocks as though too many forces were pulling [the
narrator] in different directions or taking him, and his identity, apart.
The phone ringing, a man walking through an office door, receiving a
letter all are analogies for how a potentially but not necessarily chaotic
pattern is sensitively dependent upon its initial conditions. Our lives
carry us along in ways we cannot control,10 the trilogys true narrator
reflects. Unless one controls ones life, it will be controlled, and so create
a new life. But this letter is not the one that creates chaos in the life of the
writer-narrator. A second letter from Fanshawe himself reminds the
6

Dragana Nikolic, Paul Austers Postmodernist Fiction: Deconstructing Aristotles

Poetics, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 2000: thesis
online, available from http://www.bluecricket.com/auster/articles/aristotle.html (accessed
12 August 2006).
7
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy, Los Angeles, 1994, 9.
8
Ibid., 203.
9
Ibid., 299.
10
Ibid., 298.

Chaos and Complexity in The New York Trilogy

631

narrator that Fanshawe is at the place where everything begins and that
without having had Fanshawe in his life, the narrator would not know
who he is.11
Ed Lorenz grounded his theory mathematically, and showed it to be
not just an aspect of certain events, but of material existence itself. As if
according to Lorenzs theory, the lives of Austers characters are thrown
into disarray when a phone rings, a door opens, a letter arrives. Each
occurrence sets in motion a chain of events the outcome of which neither
narrator nor reader can predict. The psychologists Chamberlain and Btz
note that the butterfly effect defines the ease with which the
behavior of interconnected systems can be influenced by the most minute
factors.12 The mathematician Steven Strogatz, co-author of the
discoveries in graph theory popularly known today as the six degrees of
separation effect, adds: The practical implication is that long-term
prediction becomes impossible in a system where small uncertainties
are amplified enormously fast.13 Not only the lives, but also the identity
of each of Austers narrators is seen to be sensitively dependent on initial
conditions, but the unnamed writer ultimately revealed as the sole
protagonist of The New York Trilogy turns out to have been using the
process of novel writing to uncover an underlying order that might help
him understand the disintegration of his identity, and allow for the
conditions for a new stable identity to emerge.
In the strange attractor lies a second expression of chaos theory in
Austers New York Trilogy. Strogatz explains how Lorenz discovered a
wonderful structure emerging when his solution was visualized as a
trajectory in phase space, that is, an imaginary three-dimensional space
which computer graphics programs can represent in two dimensions on a
flat-screen or printout: When Lorenzs trajectory was viewed in all three
dimensions no self-intersections occurred. It settled into an
exquisitely thin set that looked like a pair of butterfly wings.14 This
became the first known strange attractor (as well as the lesser-known
but no less fascinating origin of the term butterfly effect), a set of
11

Ibid., 297.
Linda L. Chamberlain and Michael R. Btz, The Lost World of
Psychopharmacology: A Return to Psychologys Jurassic Park, in Clinical Chaos: A
Therapists Guide to Nonlinear Dynamics and Therapeutic Change, eds Linda L.
Chamberlain and Michael R. Btz, Ann Arbor: MI, 1998, 128.
13
Steven H. Strogatz, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics,
Biology, Chemistry and Engineering, Boulder: CO, 2001, 320.
14
Ibid., 319.
12

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Ginger Jones and Kevin Ells

infinitely diverging complex trajectories, bound within a clearly

delineated region of phase space. In each section of The New York
Trilogy we find one character who, because of a set of ill-defined
experiences, becomes a strange attractor for another. In City of Glass,
Quinn is drawn into the orbit of Peter Stillman; the detective Blue, in
Ghosts, is fatally attracted to the mysterious writer Black; and the
narrator of The Locked Room is pulled into the vortex of the literary
estate and biography of his vanished schoolboy friend, Fanshawe. As the
life of each strange attractor is uncovered, a second character feels the
imperative to change his own life.
In City of Glass, Quinn is a private detective and mystery writer who
lives in a steady state according to habit. He earns a living, pays his rent,
and buys his groceries. He reads, watches movies and baseball, and
attends galleries and the opera. When is he hired by Virginia Stillman to
protect her husband, he is destabilized first by assuming the name Paul
Auster, then by Mrs Stillmans sudden and passionate kiss, by the sight
of a red notebook, and finally by the sight of Professor Stillman. These
circumstances are bound to Quinn and bind him. They intersect his life
and send him into a repetitious pattern that focuses on Peter Stillman.
Auster underscores that Quinns behaviour is unpredictable; for example,
he calls himself Paul Auster; he walks various routes through New York
that spell out, when viewed on a map, the letters Tower of Babel,
suggesting fragmentation and confusion; then he believes that the pattern
he has just found is a hoax he has perpetrated on himself. Auster makes
sure that the reader realizes also that Quinns attraction to Stillman
remains fixed in an infinitely recursive but regressive pattern. After
Professor Stillman disappears, and Quinns phone calls to Virginia
Stillman are answered by busy signals that offer so many possibilities,
Quinn repeats his behaviour infinitely, though tracing an infinitely
declining scope of movement and action, ultimately becoming
infinitesimal as a protagonist.15 At the end of his story, he sighs, knowing
that:
He had come to the end of himself. He could feel it now, as though a
great truth had finally dawned on him. There was nothing left . [The
16
apartment] was gone, he was gone, everything was gone.

15
16

Auster, New York Trilogy, 158.

Ibid., 188-89.

Chaos and Complexity in The New York Trilogy

633

City of Glass ends leaving readers to reconsider the roles of detective,

writer and reader, figures who search through apparent chaos for clues to
its underlying order. In Quinns story, the role of detective merges with
the role of the writer. We understand that both writer and detective make
sense of the chaos of words, and of the world. A detective searches signs
to find the clues that will make sense of everything, while a writer uses
signs or words to do the same. Auster writes:
The detective is the one who looks, listens, who moves through the
morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will
pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer
17
and the detective are interchangeable.

This implies that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the
infinite facade of gestures, tics and silences, there was finally a
coherence, an order, a source of motivation.18
The detective Blue focuses relentlessly on a certain Black in Ghosts.
Ostensibly paid by White, to keep an eye on Black for as long as
necessary,19 Blue accepts the assignment because he needs the work and
the job pays well. Little does Blue know that the case will continue for
years. This seemingly stable proposition will contribute to Blues
destabilization. Like Quinn, Blue will consciously assume a new identity
and will be aware that as he is pulled into a new system he is no longer
the same.20 Blue engages in all manner of activities to vary his
relationship to Black, but is instead wrested from his relation with the
future Mrs Blue into Blacks orbit. Eventually, Blues behaviour is
unpredictable, and he realizes he has thrown away his life. He has lost
whatever chance he might have had for happiness, and it would not be
wrong to say that he understands he is at the beginning of the end.21
But only at the end will Blue understand the meaning of his assignment,
for it is not until we are at the end of something that we know its value.
Blue becomes Black who is White. That is to say, Blue identifies so
absolutely to the detriment of his own identity with Black, ultimately
revealed to have been playing the part of White, that Blue is no longer
17

Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 103.
19
Ibid., 203.
20
Ibid., 219.
21
Ibid., 248.
18

Ginger Jones and Kevin Ells

634

the man he seems, any more than White was. Blue has been pursuing
only himself, losing his identity at the expense of finding himself. He
exists but he does not exist in himself nor for himself he is a ghost.
Like the other protagonists, the narrator of The Locked Room has a
stable and functional life, especially so after falling in love with and
marrying his childhood friend Sophie, Fanshawes widow. When he is
named literary executor of Fanshawes unpublished writings and asked
to write Fanshawes biography, the narrator is pulled into the absent and
imaginary Fanshawes orbit. His behaviour becomes erratic. He sleeps
with Fanshawes mother (as if he could control Fanshawe by possessing
Fanshawes origin); he fantasizes about killing Fanshawe (with
Fanshawe dead, he will be alive), about having Fanshawe kill him (if he
is dead, Fanshawe lives), about finding Fanshawe, and about not finding
him. With nothing but the names of some of Fanshawes acquaintances
the narrator flies to Paris to find the secretly living Fanshawe, and on his
return, still caught up in the life of Fanshawe, the narrator says that he
has tasted death, that he has seen himself dead.22 As with the other
protagonists, the narrator here must break out of the orbit of this strange
attractor.
Ultimately, readers discover that one way the narrator tried to break
free of Fanshawe was by writing the first two novels of Austers trilogy.
The unnamed narrator of The Locked Room writes:
The entire story comes down to what happened at the end and without
that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same
holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts.
These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a
23
different stage in my awareness of what it is about.

In short, each novel represents an iteration, a repetition of a sequence

of operations that yield results successively closer to a desired outcome.
The process of writing each novel brings Austers narrator (who refers to
himself in the first person only in the final chapter of City of Glass, in the
final paragraph of Ghosts, and from the first sentence of The Locked
Room) closer to understanding his situation. The process of reading each
novel brings a reader closer to understanding Austers perspective of
reality.
22
23

Ibid., 446.
Ibid., 434-35.

Chaos and Complexity in The New York Trilogy

635

Hilary P. Dannenberg writes that The traditional coincidence plot is

a key plot feature in varying manifestations from the Renaissance to the
Postmodernist novel; however, Modernist and Postmodernist fictions
also developed their own specific forms of coincidence involving
analogical relationships of correspondence.24 Austers use of
coincidence may appear postmodern compared to more conventional
coincidence narratives of the past, but is wholly modern in the sense of
the word as used in the common term modern science. Austers
insistent, intrusive coincidences have little in common with the
traditional coincidence plot. They reveal, rather, the existence of an
impersonal pattern of behaviour observed in nature and mathematically
verified in a wide range of situations in which a particular algorithm is
iterated repeatedly using the result of a previous iteration as the input of
each new iteration.
For example, a series of mathematical iterations of a simplified
formula for charting predicted population increases, one often used to
illustrate chaos theory, results in four distinct patterns of iteration
depending upon the initial value of one of its variables: first, the series of
numbers declines infinitely toward zero; second, the series of numbers
oscillates widely at first but rapidly converges to a steady state; third, the
series of numbers permanently oscillates between two values; and fourth,
the series of numbers generates an utterly unpredictable pattern.25 Paul
Auster seems to be replicating each of these patterns through his
protagonists struggles with identity. In City of Glass, Quinns identity
inexorably declines to a vanishing point. Blue, in Ghosts, achieves some
stability only after oscillating in bipolar fashion between affection and
revulsion with respect to Black. The unnamed narrator of The Locked
Room suffers a mental breakdown before ultimately regaining stability
enough to continue living. Quinn, Blue, and the unnamed narrator each
enter a chaotic state in which their actions become unpredictable even to
themselves. Garan Holcombe writes that Auster is an author who
subscribes to the belief that it is only through the construction of reality
that we are truly able to perceive, rationalise and comprehend the one
24

Hilary P. Dannenberg, A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction, Poetics Today,

XXV/3 (Fall 2004), 399.
25
L. Douglas Kiel and Euel Elliott, Exploring Nonlinear Dynamics with a Spreadsheet:
A Graphical View of Chaos for Beginners, in Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences:
Foundations and Applications, eds L. Douglas Kiel and Euel Elliott, Ann Arbor: MI,
1996, 19-29.

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Ginger Jones and Kevin Ells

within which we are forced to spend our lives; he is fascinated by the

breaking down of the boundaries between what is lived and what is read;
and the blurring of the distinction between what is experienced and what
is written.26 Auster seeks to explain through stories how we can
discover, even recover, a sense of self.
The first plot iteration illustrates how the protagonists identity is
subsumed by the strange attractor, the second plot iteration shows how
the protagonist overpowers the strange attractor, and the final plot
iteration depicts the protagonist moving between these extremes toward a
solidified but probably tentative sense of his own identity.
One should recall that the chaos of chaos theory refers not to pure
randomness, let alone meaninglessness, but to apparent surface chaos
overlaying a deep structural order. Complexity refers to the ability to
switch between different modes of behavior as environmental conditions
are varied.27 Mitchell Waldrop adds that Self-organization depends on
self-reinforcement: the tendency for small effects to become magnified
when conditions are right.28 For example, between 1960 and 1966,
Quebec transformed itself, seemingly overnight, from a Catholic,
agrarian, traditional society dominated by a system of clergy,
government officials, English corporations, and wealthy French
Canadians into a liberal, secular, industrial state with a burgeoning
separatist movement. Clearly, the social conditions for what has since
been called, by historians such as Claude Blanger, the Quiet
Revolution had been brewing for decades, but the death of a man who
had been premier of Quebec for a generation, in a sociologically youthful
culture (the Baby Boom ran deeper and longer in Canada than in the US),
provided the final impetus to a reorganization that could never be undone
and returned to its original state.
The New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell suggested that some
messages, trends, fads, and ideas approach and then surpass what he calls
a tipping point.29 This popularization of the concept of emergence in
complexity theory, in which a complex system on the edge of chaos, at a
26

Garan Holcombe, Reflections on the Work of Paul Auster, California Literary

Review: available from http://www.calitreview.com/Essays/paul_auster_5007.htm
(accessed 12 August 2006).
27
Grgoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction, New
York, 1989, 218.
28
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and
Chaos, New York, 1992, 34.
29
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, Boston, 2000.

Chaos and Complexity in The New York Trilogy

637

specific point, spontaneously organizes into a new order, if true, would

let critics extend literary analyses derived from chaos theory even
further. Happily, the British science journalist Mark Buchanan makes
clear that the idea is true:
Even though we know perhaps next to nothing at all about the
psychology and sociology of ideas, mathematical physics guarantees that
there is a tipping point. The basic idea of the tipping point is not even
30
debatable.

As we said at the beginning of this essay, it is extremely unlikely that

Auster intentionally based the plots of his early novels directly on chaos
or complexity theory. Though foreseen by Edward Lorenz in 1962, when
Auster was only fifteen, chaos theory was only named as such by the
physicist James Yorke in 1975, when scientists around the world
became aware of a kind of motion that we now call chaos.31
And, as we noted earlier, James Gleick offered a compelling history and
lucid explication of chaos theory for the non-scientific reader only in
1987, the year The New York Trilogy first appeared in one volume after
its three sections, City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, had been
published independently during the previous two years. Finally, the
history of complexity theory was not introduced to the general educated
reader in English until five years after that, by the physicist M. Mitchell
Waldrop.
Yet, Austers novels follow a pattern that bears a striking resemblance
to the entire perspective of chaos and complexity theory. With each
iteration of a plot whose underlying relatively simple order was revealed
in full in The Locked Room, Auster achieves a detailed, subtle, nuanced,
and precise image of the spontaneous reorganization of a new system
after it has reached its tipping point. Quinns decline pauses at one point,
but Quinn is finally unable to stop it. Blue violently asserts himself
against Black, spontaneously regaining equilibrium, but he is no longer
the same character, and we do not know what will become of him. The
unnamed narrator of The Locked Room oscillates between dissolution
and catastrophic violence, emerging after his breakdown with an identity
30

Mark Buchanan, Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks,
New York, 2002, 168.
31
Kathleen T. Alligood, Tim D. Sauer, and James A. Yorke, Chaos: An Introduction to
Dynamical Systems, New York, 1996, vi.

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resilient enough to deal directly with Fanshawe.

Perhaps Auster is aware of chaos precepts two decades after Gleicks
introduction of them to the educated general reader, but not necessarily.
The link between science and literature seems as nonlinear as the
relationships in nature observed by chaos and complexity theorists. There
is certainly no established lead time nor pattern of influence observable
between literature and any of the major scientific ideas of the past
century and a half such as evolution, genetics, psychoanalysis, quantum
mechanics, cybernetics, or system theory.
Though Auster is frequently described as a postmodern novelist,
Auster himself claims he represents the role of coincidence as he has
actually experienced it. Ive always contended that Im a realist, Auster
has said, that, indeed, the world is a lot stranger than people credit; that
really what theyre responding to are the conventions of fiction as
theyve been established since the late nineteenth century.32 Certainly,
postmodern is a term defined in widely divergent ways by different
writers. The advantage of viewing Auster through the paradigm of chaos
and complexity is that ones critical terminology corresponds to
established technical definitions. Like postmodern, chaos can mean
different things to different people, but if one is investigating the
connection between a given literary work and chaos theory, chaos cannot
mean, for example, entropy, randomness, or an existential abyss. In one
recent interview, Auster speaks of his narratives as arising from an
inaccessible place in his unconscious, and of course, agrees with his
interviewers by now routine observation about the role chance plays in
his stories (this is why we posited the butterfly effect as a lucid metaphor
for Austers narrative technique but not a thesis-worthy observation in
itself).33
Wittgenstein wrote that language can been seen as an ancient city: a
maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses with additions
from various periods.34 A haunted glass city, indeed, and full of locked
rooms. Auster certainly understood how we use language to orient
32
Adrian Gargett, Paul Auster: Cruel Universe, Spike Magazine, November 2002:
available from http://spikemagazine.com/1102paulauster.php (accessed 11 February
2008).
33
Jill Owens, The Book of Paul Auster, 2007: available from http://www.powells.
com/interviews/auster.html (accessed 5 June 2007).
34
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M Anscombe, Oxford,
1972, 8.

Chaos and Complexity in The New York Trilogy

639

ourselves within discourse to make points and enforce stability35 and

used his early plots to explore how a character rely on language in order
to survive the disintegration of one identity and the achieve
reconstruction of a second, more suitable and equally stable identity. But
as Austers narrator realizes at the end of The Locked Room, and as he
dramatizes through his alternate roads potentially travelled by, but not
taken, by Quinn in City of Glass and Blue in Ghosts, it could have easily
been otherwise, and a ringing phone, an opening door, or a letter falling
light as a butterfly through a mail slot, can set off a psychological
hurricane.

35

Kenneth J. Knoespel, The Employment of Chaos: Instability and Narrative Order, in

Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine
Hayles, Chicago, 1991, 109.