Metafictions are “self-conscious” fictions. They involve several “layers of reality and identity” as a framework for exploring questions with multiple variables. Paul Auster’s City of Glass utilizes this structure and employs as its first layer the façade of a detective novel. Although, after reading this novel, it is clear that there is no physical search involved and that the deft twists in plot are not meant to signal an answer to the mystery; rather, these fallacies, antitheses and symbols demonstrate the arbitrary quality of names. Paul Auster reveals to readers how names are employed as a means of exerting control over otherwise unidentifiable objects.

         For the protagonist of City of Glass, names and the act of naming allows Dan Quinn to control his actions following a traumatic event. It is not that his alter egos “Paul Auster,” “William Wilson” and “Max Work” represent the essence of his personality better than his given name, but through these characters, he feels “comparably lighter and freer” (Auster 82). Dan Quinn admits that “it [is] all an illusion” because he still has “the same body,” “the same mind, the same thoughts,” but he finds relief in the act of taking himself “out of himself” and putting himself in another body (Auster 82). Any responsibility these characters have, Dan Quinn gives to them; whereas Dan Quinn himself is subject to fate. When he ponders his inability to reach Virginia Stillman, he recognizes that fate is “precisely what he mean[s] to say” (Auster 170). He concedes by accepting that the “generalized condition of things” is the “ground on which the happenings of the world took place. He could not be more definite than that” (Auster 170).

         In other words, names cannot represent the substance of an idea more that it just “differentiates” one idea from another—“that is all” (Auster 183). Names give people a method of control over their surroundings. When Dan Quinn is in a favorable situation, or not subject to more willful people, he assumes his name. He is proud of his detective novels which “against all expectations” were “book[s] he himself had written” (Auster 85). He fantasizes meeting fans who he could give “with great reluctance and modesty” an “autograph on the title page” because “the writer and the detective are interchangeable” (Auster 15). These interesting diction choices have personal connotations.

         Throughout the novel, Dan Quinn resists being a “puppet boy” (Auster 36). Names him allow him to do just that by making a “marionette” out of any concept that can be put to an arbitrary name (Auster 25). Paul Auster uses this novel in the same manner. By giving Dan Quinn the name Paul Auster and using an unreliable narrator, he exerts his own will on reader’s perceptions. Thus, City of Glass is the Stillman experiment in a metafiction.