SOURCE: “Mirrors and Madness: Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy,” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXXVII, No. 1, Fall, 1995, pp. 17-33.

In the following essay, Alford examines the identity and function of the narrator in The New York Trilogy and the use of shifting perspectives to juxtapose contradictory aspects of self-identity, textual meaning, and relationships between author, narrator, and reader.

My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.

—The Locked Room

Among the many puzzles in Paul Auster's remarkable New York Trilogy, a persistent one involves the identity of the narrator(s) of these novels. In answering the question, Who narrates these three...