Material Entanglements: Identity Collapse and Object Agency in Paul Auster’s City of Glass

Paul Auster’s City of Glass, a seminal work of postmodern urban literature, unravels the disintegration of Daniel Quinn—a writer who morphs into a detective and ultimately a nameless wanderer—through a labyrinth of material encounters. This paper repositions City of Glass within the framework of new materialism, arguing that Quinn’s identity crisis is not merely a psychological collapse but a material entanglement. By centering the agency of objects—names, the red notebook, and urban spaces—the analysis reveals how nonhuman actors actively co-author Quinn’s subjectivity, reflecting broader tensions in 21st-century urban existence. Quinn’s reliance on pseudonyms, the parasitic vitality of the red notebook, and his submersion into empty apartments exemplify the animacy of objects and their dual capacity to mediate desire and despair. City of Glass prefigures the material logic of 21st-century identity crises, urging a reimagining of human-object relations in an age of ecological and digital precarity. Through this lens, City of Glass critiques the fragility of selfhood in consumerist urban environments, where identity dissolves into a contested terrain shaped by the vibrancy of matter.