The numbers in square brackets [from 1697 to 1708] show the beginning of the related page in the
original printing.

BIBLIOTECA FILOLÓXICA GALEGA• INSTITUTO DA LINGUA GALEGA• ACTAS DO XX
CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE CIENCIAS ONOMÁSTICAS, SANTIAGO, 1999. A CORUÑA,
2002: 1697-1708.

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY: THE USE OF NAMES IN PAUL AUSTER'S NARRATIVE FICTION

Pasquale Marzano

The New York Trilogy (Auster, 1990, from now on NYT) is one of Paul Auster's best known narrative
fiction works. It contains three short novels, City of Glass (NYT:1-158), Ghosts (NYT:159-232) and The
Locked Room (NYT:233-371), in which names are a relevant topic or represent an important aspect of the
author's style. This is particularly true of the first, City of Glass, where one of the main characters, Peter
Stillman, is a scholar concerned with language and the lack of a strict connection between things named
and names. He remembers that when Adam had to name things and creatures in Eden he knew exactly
how to do so: the link name-creatures named was quite natural and smooth. To certain qualities would
correspond some names and vice-versa. According to Stillman all this would have changed after the Fall.
He affirms that his duty would be to give a new name to things which have lost their original and
meaningful link with the name used. His ideas about the subject recalls those already contained in Plato's
Cratilus, where two characters support two different theories about language: one considering it as a
codified system of arbitrarily chosen signs and the other (Cratilus) arguing that language is naturally linked
to the things named, through an unchangeable and reciprocal relationship between them. Anthropologists
and linguists have often discussed this same dichotomy, arriving at the conclusion that in primitive
societies the second option would prevail, that is to say that they would consider proper names as bearing
a meaning which goes much beyond the function attributed to them in our culture, where they are
conceived as pure and arbitrarily chosen signs of a specific code, from a scientific and linguistic point of
view at least. This is clearly stated, for example, by James Frazer in his essay The Golden Bough (Frazer
1924) or by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in his study entitled L'Expérience mystiques et les symboles chez les
primitifs (Lévy-Bruhl 1938). Frazer says:

Unable to discriminate clearly between words and things, the savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the
person or thing denominated by it is not a [1698] mere arbitrary and ideal association, but a real and substantial bond which
unites the two [...] primitive man regards his name as a vital portion of himself and takes care of it accordingly (J. Frazer,
1924:244).

Lévy-Bruhl refers to the so called 'primitives', expressing a similar concept:

Le nom, chez eux, est tout autre chose qu'un moyen commode de désigner quelqu'un, et de le reconnaître parmi d'autres, une
sorte d'étiquette fichée sur chaque individu, qui peut être arbitrairement choisie, et au besoin changée, et qui lui reste extérieure,
sans rien de commun avec sa personnalité intime (Lévy-Bruhl, 1938:303).

In our contemporary way of conceiving language it would be clear on the other hand that proper names
are sort of labels, with no meaning or signification at all, as affirmed by John Stuart Mill first (Mill
1862:23-48) and later scientifically argued and demonstrated by the linguist F. de Saussure (De Saussure,
1916) and other scholars (see Ducrot/Todorov, 1972:170-172). 1 This cannot be true for writers, of
course, since they often use the associations and interpretations evoked by proper names as a means of
making their stories more intriguing or interesting, as is the case of Paul Auster's narrative fiction in
general. We could say that there is no book of his where there are not any puns, or further meanings
suggested by some characters' names or even by the toponyms used. Literary convention obviously tends
to consider anthroponyms as intimately connected to characters, with an analogy or a meaningful contrast
between the names they get and their attitudes or prevailing mood (Rimmon-Kenan 1986:68-69). Auster's
work normally follows this convention (see e. g. The music of Chance, 1991, Moon Palace, 1992, Mr.
Vertigo, 1994 or also Timbuktu, 1999), but in The New York Trilogy he seems to adopt another kind of
approach to the naming of the characters, because names are still important as elsewhere, but they are
used in a slightly different way. The author plays with the literary and psychological stereotypes about
anthroponyms, their suggested analogy with characters' destiny and their importance to both the text and
the plot. In a certain way, he subverts those conventional rules he does not refuse to follow in his other
books. In fact, in The New York Trilogy he shows how those conventions work, by exposing them and
attracting the reader's attention upon their presence in the structure of the stories. One of the most
relevant onomastic habits respected by many traditional authors is, for example, that sort of obligation
which pushes them to avoid using similar names for different characters in the same story, especially
when they are members of the same family. That is a case in which «a realistic novelist» would pay
particular attention to differentiating first names (Hamon 1977:144-145), but Auster [1699]consciously
defies this implied law. In fact, in the first novel of the trilogy there are some characters who bear the
same name (Daniel and William Wilson) and the author demonstrates he named them that way on
purpose, by drawing the reader's attention to the phenomenon (NYT:122 and 153). There are also two
characters called Peter Stillman and they are father and son. The youngest is a typical unreliable narrator
(see Rimmon-Kenan 1986:100-103), since he has got language problems due to an experiment his father
made on him when he was a child. Peter Stillman Jr. tells his story and evokes doubts about his father's
name and identity as well as about his own:

For thirteen years the father was away. His name's Peter Stillman too. Strange, is it not? That two people can have the same
name? I do not know if that is his real name. But I do not think he is me. We are both Peter Stillman. But Peter Stillman is not
my real name. So perhaps I am not Peter Stillman, after all (NYT:21-22).

The reason why Peter Stillman Junior has got so many problems with words is that when he was a child
his father locked him in a dark room where he could not talk to anybody. His father's aim was to
demonstrate that, once grown up, the boy would have finally spoken a sort of natural and innate language,
«God's language» (NYT:24-25) that Peter thinks he has learnt to speak in the dark and that every human
being would be supposed to master in certain conditions. An old theory to which the entire 4th chapter of
the novel is dedicated, where it is given a short account of several real experiences of the same type. The
unreliability of Peter Stillman Jr. as a narrator is indirectly highlighted by the main narrator in the text
(external and unnamed), quoting Herodotus as «a notoriously unreliable chronicler», who wrote about a
successful experiment of the same kind led by the pharaoh Psamtik (NYT:39). In Stillman's case the result
was obviously completely unsatisfactory and the damage little Peter suffered from the experience will
affect his entire life. The way he conceives names and identities will be equally affected, as it is clearly
shown in a long passage where he explains his story to the false private eye Paul Auster, alias Daniel
Quinn, a mystery novel writer:

I am Peter Stillman [...]. My name is Peter Stillman. Perhaps you have heard of me, but more than likely not. No matter. That is
not my real name. My real name I cannot remember (NYT:18).

His account to Quinn is interpolated by several sentences in which he keeps affirming his identity and
denying it soon after, by calling himself by other different names:

I am Peter Stillman. That is not my real name. My real name is Mr. Sad. What is your name, Mr. Auster? Perhaps you are the
real Mr. Sad, and I am no one. I am Peter Stillman. That is not my real name. My real name is Peter Rabbit. In the Winter I am
Mr. White, in the Summer I am Mr. Green. Think what you like of this. I say it of my own free will. Wimble click crumblechaw
beloo. It is beautiful, is it not? I make up words like this all the time. That can't be helped. They just come out of my mouth by
themselves. They cannot be translated (NYT:20-21).

[1700] The young man says he is a poet and that he likes inventing words, as his father, his double, will
say he is doing later on. The fragmentation of the language spoken by Peter coincides with a fragmented
identity, expressed through his different names. We will see that his father conceives the world in a similar
way, as a collection of fragments, including both objects and language, which he feels obliged to
re-organize according to a natural and now lost order. However, names are at stake and a name started all
the story, when somebody called Daniel Quinn mistaking him for the detective Paul Auster. The first time
Quinn replies they have got a wrong number, but on the third call he accepts to meet the people who say
they need Auster's help. The call comes from Virginia Stillman, young Peter's wife, who later explains to
Quinn/Auster that her husband might be in danger, since Peter Stillman's father is going to leave the
mental hospital where he was confined for what he had done to his son. She fears the old man might try
to contact his son and that he might do him further harm. So she asks Quinn/Auster to spy on Peter
Stillman Sr., to prevent him from hurting her husband. This leads to a key sequence at the railway station,
where Quinn/Auster sees, for the first time, the man he must follow, but also another who looks exactly
the same, as if the two men were twins (NYT:67-68). There is only one difference: the first Stillman looks
like a «broken down» and «shabby creature», whereas the second one has «a prosperous air about him»
and is wearing expensive clothes (NYT:68). The scene is a clear 'kernel' (see Barthes 1966:9-10) in the
novel, a shift which will irreversibly affect its further development. The character Daniel Quinn/Paul
Auster is in the same kind of situation as the author Paul Auster: a sort of mise en abyme then (see
Rimmon-Kenan 1986:93). They can choose to follow one Peter Stillman or the other, but they cannot
take care of both at the same time. The narrator makes clear that the choice would be arbitrary anyway:
«Whatever choice he made -and he had to make a choice- would be arbitrary, a submission to chance»
(NYT:68). So Quinn/Auster decides to follow the one who looks worse, supposing he is the «mad
Stillman» also because he looks so «shabby» and «disconnected from his surroundings» (NYT:68). From
that time on he considers that one as the real and the only one, 2 as the reader is also obliged to do. With a
sequence like this, the author shows the deep, bare structure of the novel, because he does not hide the
two open possibilities offered to the writer and to the reader, but he includes them in the text, letting them
be part of the story. We can consider this scene as a process of 'defamiliarization', since through it «the
writer modifies the reader's habitual perceptions by drawing attention to the artifice of the text» (Cuddon
1982:226). The same type of device was widely used by writers such as Laurence Sterne, whom Auster
himself quotes to explain his own tendency to digress, another way to provoke 'defamiliarization' in a text
(Auster 1998c: 21-22). The 'arbitrariness of the choice' runs throughout the entire novel and it is reaf-
[1701] firmed in another narrative sequence, where Stillman suggests many free associations of words
with Quinn's surname, based upon a mere phonetic resemblance. After Quinn has followed Peter Stillman
for a while, he introduces himself to the man, who analyses all the possibilities of linguistic and semantic
links offered by the false detective's surname. The fact that there is no limit to the interpretations might be
considered as another device adopted by Stillman to support his opinion about the losing of an immutable
connection between linguistic signs and things named:

"I see. Yes, yes, I see. Quinn. Hmmm. Yes. Very interesting. Quinn. A most resonant word. Rhymes with twin, does it not?
"That's right. Twin". "And sin, too, if I'm not mistaken". "You're not". "And also in-one n-or inn-two. Isn't that so?" "Exactly".
"Hmmm. Very interesting. I see many possibilities for this word, this Quinn, this quintessence of quiddity. Quick, for example.
And quill. And quack. And quirk. Hmmm. Rhymes with grin. Not to speak of kin. Hmm. Very interesting. And win. And fin.
And din. And gin. And pin. And tin. And bin. Hmmm. Even rhymes with djinn. Hmmm. And if you say it right, with been.
Hmmm. Yes, very interesting. I like your name enormously, Mr Quinn. It flies off in so many little directions at once"
(NYT:89-90).

Then he talks to him about the research he says he is doing, making clear what his goal is: «You see, the
world is in fragments, sir. And it's my job to put it back together again» (NYT:91). The old scholar finally
explains his theory about language and names. He also confesses that the pamphlet The New Babel,
previously attributed to a mysterious Henry Dark, had been written by himself. At this stage there is an
interesting explanation of the mental process which had pushed him to choose the name Henry Dark to
sign that book, in a sort of allegory of the efforts made by the literary critics and/or by the scholars of
literary onomastics to find out what a name hides: 3

"How did you decide on the name Henry Dark?" "It's a good name, don't you think? I like it very much. Full of mystery, and at
the same time quite proper. It suited my purpose well. And besides, it had a secret meaning". "The allusion to darkness?" "No,
no. Nothing so obvious. It was the initials, H. D. That was very important. [...] Make three guesses" (NYT:96-97).

Quinn tries to guess the meaning of the initials H. D.; he says Henry David first, for Henry David
Thoreau, then he tries with Helda Doolittle, for the poet, and finally «H for [1702] the weeping
philosopher, Heraclitus and D for the laughing philosopher, Democritus. Heraclitus and Democritus the
two poles of dialectic» (NYT:97), which Stillman appreciates as a «very clever answer», even if it is not
the right one. Then he explains what they refer to:

"The initials H. D. in the name Henry Dark refer to Humpty Dumpty". [...] The egg. [...] Humpty Dumpty: the purest
embodiment of the human condition. Listen carefully, sir. What is an egg? It is that which has not yet been born. A paradox, is it
not? For how can Humpty Dumpty be alive if he has not been born? And yet, he is alive -make no mistake. We know that
because he can speak. More than that, he is a philosopher of language. 'When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a
scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean -neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make
words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master -that's all'" (NYT:98).

Humpty Dumpty is considered as a philosopher of language and a prophet:

"Humpty Dumpty sketches the future of human hopes and gives the clue to our salvation: to become masters of the words we
speak, to make language answer our needs. Humpty Dumpty was a prophet, a man who spoke truths the world was not ready
for" (NYT:98).

In fact, once again, Stillman indirectly shows how names are now chosen arbitrarily, since that ability to
mean with a word «just what» one chooses «it to mean» was lost with the Fall and only a few will be
able «to become masters of the words» they speak, like Humpty Dumpty and Peter Stillman Sr., of
course. He says he will be able to reach his goal, by re-naming those things which lost their original, deep
meaning, but he can not reveal the results of his studies yet, to avoid his work being plagiarised
(NYT:95-96). As far as the names chosen by the flesh and blood writer Paul Auster are concerned, we
can note that there is a very deep mixture of elements taken from real life and fiction. In the novel there is
a character who is a writer called Paul Auster whose wife's name is Siri, and whose son is Daniel. Now,
Auster's real wife is called Siri and he really has a son called Daniel (see Auster 1998c:139-151). This
might be considered as a sort of tribute he offers to his family, of the same kind as those he talks about in
a long interview with Gérard de Cortanze (Auster, 1998c: 81). Quinn was a nom de plume he used at the
beginning of his career, when he got a job as a book review writer «for a shoddily put together publication
aimed at students». We know that «sensing that the magazine wasn't going to add up to much» he signed
his articles «with a pseudonym, just to keep things interesting» (Auster, 1998a: 46-47). Moreover, his
mother's name was Queenie. The possible phonetic link between the couple of anthroponyms
Quinn-Queenie is one not mentioned by Peter Stillman in the novel, but it is no less relevant, since Quinn
«flies off in so many little directions at once» (NYT:89-90). Auster remembers his mother's name in The
Invention of Solitude (Auster, 1997), where he proposes it as a good example of his grandfather's «odd
and majestic optimism». The man affirmed Auster's [1703] mother would have been a «queen» and that
is why he called her queenie (Auster 1997:119). The author's biography shows quite clearly how he is
fascinated by names even in his real life and how he never fails to notice possible links, connections and
coincidences which are originated by their comparison or by their resemblance with other words (see
Auster 1994a:7, 11). Words and names which recall each other, or which sound like each other, evoke a
sort of magic or mysterious bond for Auster (see Auster 1997:165-168), in a way not too far from that
Frazer and Lévy-Bruhl considered as a 'savage' or 'primitive' approach to them (see above). From
Auster's point of view, two people bearing the same name seem to share something more than a simple
'label' used to identify them (see Auster 1997:83,136). The names in the novel also convey an idea of
'double', besides the possible choice between two or more options and its ineluctable arbitrariness. They
are presented as mirrors reflecting each other as happens with Peter Stillman Sr., who is also Henry Dark,
or with Daniel Quinn, who used to sign his books as William Wilson (besides letting somebody believe he
is the detective Paul Auster) another side of Quinn's personality:

William Wilson, after all, was an invention, and even though he had been born within Quinn himself, he now led an independent
life (NYT:5).

The protagonist of Wilson's/Quinn's books is a detective called Max Work 4 and Quinn tries to follow his
example once he has accepted the Stillman case. However, when he feels in trouble because of his
investigation, he looks for the 'real' detective Paul Auster, but he finds out there is no detective of that
name. Paul Auster is a writer as Quinn himself is, so that the exchange and confusion of roles and
identities is made more complex, as one can infer from the scene in which Quinn meets Auster's son:

"I see you've already met. Daniel," he said to the boy, "this is Daniel". And then to Quinn, with that same ironic smile, "Daniel,
this is Daniel". The boy burst out laughing and said, "Everybody's Daniel!" "That's right," said Quinn. "I'm you, and you're me".
[...] The boy looked at him from across the room and laughed again. "Good-bye myself!" he said (NYT:122).

Having met Auster's wife and son, Quinn thinks he would have liked to live that same life lived by the
'real' Paul Auster (NYT:121), his alter ego. But he is not Paul Auster after all and that name is not enough
to give him that chance, except for a while. He understands it right from the beginning, when he starts
writing notes in his red notebook: «I have no answer. All I can say is this: listen to me. My name is Paul
Auster. That is not my real name» (NYT:49). Reality is not what it seems to be and even names can not
define people's personality once and for all. Daniel Quinn goes through several changes [1704] of
personality, sanctioned by the use of different names. He shares a part of all these lives, fictional and
not-fictional, but he loses grip on his real self, which is much affected by all these changes. Moreover,
William Wilson could be considered as a key for the idea of 'double' suggested earlier on (see above). In
fact, that is evoked in many ways in the text, but the most relevant one occurs when Daniel Quinn thinks
about his favourite baseball team, trying to remember its players:

The centerfielder, he remembered, was Mookie Wilson, a promising young player whose real name was William Wilson.
Surely there was something interesting in that (NYT:153).

The thought there might be «something interesting in that», that is to say in the onomastic relationship
between the two William Wilsons, seems to be soon abandoned:

Quinn pursued the idea a few moments but then abandoned it. The two William Wilsons cancelled each other out, and that was
all. Quinn waved good-bye to them in his mind. The Mets would finish in last place again, and no one would suffer (NYT:153).

However, if we think about the author's admiration for Edgar Allan Poe, we can consider William Wilson
as a clue, offered to the reader and to the critic, as briefly underlined by David Lodge (Lodge 1995:53)5.
In fact, William Wilson is the title of a famous short story by Poe, also explicitly quoted in Auster's novel
(NYT:100, 300). Poe's story deals with «a man following his Doppelgänger», (Lodge 1995:53) as it
happens to Quinn, followed by his past self from whom he tries to escape. He wants to cancel his
previous life in favour of that he has started after his wife and son's death. To get completely rid of
himself he had begun to use the name William Wilson:

But quite abruptly, he had given up all that. A part of him had died, he told his friends, and he did not want it coming back to haunt him. It was then that he had taken on the name of
William Wilson. Quinn was no longer that part of him that could write books, and although in many ways Quinn continued to exist, he no longer existed for anyone but himself (NYT:4).

The meeting with the writer Paul Auster destroys the balance he had been able to establish by adopting a
new name and acquiring a new personality. The comparison with the man he is not and he would have
liked to be is unbearable:

It was too much for Quinn. He felt as though Auster was taunting him with the things he had lost, and he responded with envy and rage, a lacerating self pity. Yes, he too would have liked
to have this wife and this child, to sit around all day spouting drivel about old books, to be surrounded by yoyos and ham omelettes and fountain pens (NYT:121). 5

[1705] So as «the two William Wilsons cancelled each other out», the character cancels himself from the
story. The narrator remembers how Quinn disappeared during the last part of his investigation about
Stillman: «Remarkable as it seems, no one ever noticed Quinn. It was as though he had melted into the
walls of the city» (NYT:139). There is no solution at the end. Quinn stops taking notes about the case and
starts writing about «the stars, the earth, his hopes for mankind» (NYT:157). The narrator tells us:

He felt that his words had been severed from him, that now they were a part of the world at large, as real and specific as a
stone, or a lake, or a flower. They no longer had to do anything with him. He remembered the moment of his birth [...]. He
remembered the infinite kindness of the world and all the people he had ever loved. Nothing mattered now but the beauty of all
this. He wanted to go on writing about it, and it pained him to know that this would not be possible. Nevertheless, he tried to
face the end of the red notebook with courage (NYT:157).

He behaves like a poet, like Peter Stillman Jr. had done before. Quinn uses the 'red notebook' to write
about his thoughts and he regrets having «wasted» so many pages of it to write about Stillman's case. His
only concern is about the end of the notebook, the concrete chance to express himself and that is why he
starts thinking about another possibility:

He wondered if he had it in him to write without a pen, if he could learn to speak instead, filling the darkness with his voice,
speaking the words into the air, into the walls, into the city, even if the light never came back again (NYT:156-157).

Like little Peter Stillman locked in the dark room by his father, Quinn tries to «learn to speak» to «fill the
darkness with his voice». But the pages left in the notebook are nearly finished and so is the story
narrated in the novel. The reader will never know whether Quinn will learn to speak that way. At «this
point the story grows obscure» as it is stated by the narrator (NYT:157), who is reading that same
notebook he got from the writer Paul Auster. The circle is closed. Quinn's investigation is concluded: he
has found himself, his Doppelgänger, going back through his memory to the time when he was born. In
fact, the scene of the room getting darker and darker, with the character in the middle of an empty space,
is a mise en abime of the scene of his birth. Quinn remembers «how he had been pulled gently from his
mother's womb» (NYT:156), before having a name, before someone could give him one. He goes back to
that stage and all vanishes in the 'urban nothingness' (see Caleffi, 1996) surrounding him, as the same
character does, lost in the 'city of glass'.

In the second novel (Ghosts) all characters bear surnames like Blue, Black, White, Gray, Brown, Red and
so on. Even a foreign surname like 'Russo' ('red' in regional Italian) or a toponym, like Orange Street, are
based upon colours: a clear sign of how these names can be considered as meaningless and arbitrarily
chosen labels. 6 In fact, [1706] colours are a typical way of labelling things. Moreover, at a certain point
the main character (Blue) starts thinking about colours and the way they are associated with things and
words. He takes into account the three colours related to his story, that is to say blue, white and black:

[...] he thinks how strange it is that everything has its own color. Everything we see, everything we touch ­everything in the
world has its own color. [...] Take blue for example, he says. There are bluebirds and blue jays and blue herons. [...] There are
blueberries, huckleberries [...]. There are blue devils and blue ribbons and blue bloods. There is a voice singing the blues. [...]
There are blue laws and blue movies. There are my eyes and my name. He pauses, suddenly at a loss for more blue things, and
then moves on to white. [...]. Then, without hesitating, he moves on to black, beginning with black books, the black market and
the Black Hand. [...] (NYT, 217).

That is how the reader's attention is drawn to the device used to name the characters. The author does
not want it to go unnoticed. In real life it would be highly unlikely to get so many names like those in the
same story, but the author does not want his novel to appear like 'realistic'. In fact, its plot seems to
convey the idea of the uselessness or of the absurdity ruling our lives, or at least those of Auster's
characters. Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black and to write a report
about him everyday. From a window of a rented room on Orange Street, he keeps watch on Black, who
is across the street, staring out of his window. With time Blue finds out that the man who gave him the
job might have been Black in disguise. He also finds out that Black is spying on him, as if he was looking
at himself in a mirror. The circularity of the events is mirrored in the routine of the investigation and it is
also suggested by the phonetic resemblance of the two surnames Blue/Black. It ends when Blue assaults
Black physically (NYT:231), as in a desperate attempt to break the endless monotony in which he feels as
if he is in an inescapable trap. He does not know whether he has killed Black or not, but he is now free to
vanish into the same nothingness that swallowed up the false detective Daniel Quinn (NYT:232).

In the last story (The Locked Room) Auster demonstrates how artificial the process of giving names can
be, through a character who explains how he has been inventing false but real-like names to fill some
forms for a census-taker job he had to do for the government. 7 He associates people and anthroponyms
according to his own taste, with no other obligation than their credibility, in a kind of parody of the work
on names a writer does every time he has to name a character:

Most of all there was the pleasure of making up names. At times I had to curb my impulse towards the outlandish ­the fiercely
comical, the pun, the dirty word­ but for the most part I was content to stay within the bounds of realism (NYT:293-294).

[1707] Exactly what Auster does in his other fiction works, even if in The New York Trilogy, the open
structure of the three stories (see Lodge, 1995: 48-55) is a sort of allegory of how it is impossible to
re-establish a deep and immutable relation between 'signifier' and 'signified', as was possible on the
contrary before the Fall.

Footnotes

[1698]

1. Lotman and Uspenskij (1995:89) criticize this point of view and the philosopher of language Searle (1976:220) reminds us
that we keep attributing a special value to proper names, despite the undeniable validity of the linguistic theory about their lack
of real signification. The philosophical and linguistic theory dealt with in Auster's novel is very likely based upon a Walter
Benjamin's essay (1995: 53-70). Auster's admiration for Benjamin can be inferred from the way he has used the name
Benjamin as a pseudonym for himself and as a name for some of his characters (see P. Marzano 2000-01:115, n. 2, 122, n.
30 and 124, n. 34).

[1700]

2. This choice will be recalled at the end, when Quinn wonders about what would have happened if he had followed «the
second Stillman instead of the first» (NYT:154).

[1701]

3. The same name is used to get a new identity by one of the two main characters in The Locked Room, the last novel of the
trilogy (NYT:366).

[1703]

4. Another side of Quinn's multiple personality expressed through a name: «If Quinn had allowed himself to vanish, to withdraw
into the confines of a strange and hermetic life, Work continued to live in the world of others, and the more Quinn seemed to
vanish, the more persistent Work's presence in that world became» (NYT:10).

[1704]

5. According to Lodge, The New York Trilogy shows how names are chosen arbitrarily, a statement which is reflected in the
structure of the three novels in the book (Lodge 1995:48-55). However, he does not take into account the way Paul Auster
normally uses and considers names, which shows a different approach to the subject.

[1705]

6. The author took the plot and most of the names used for the novel from a previous work of his, a play entitled Blackouts
(see Auster 1998a:167-188). The play seems to be conceived in the style of Beckett, an author much admired by Auster, who
also refers to him to explain how he used names taken from real life for his fictional works, in a way quite similar to Auster's
(Auster 1998c:81).

[1706]

7. The episode is based on one that actually happened to Auster in 1970, when he worked as a census-taker for a while (see
Auster, 1998c: 48).

[1707]

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