Although Paul Auster’s three part novel The New York Trilogy (1987), consisting of three separate novels; City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room, was written more than forty years after the events that in most critics view ended the modernist era and pushed us into the Postmodern this article will argue that the text deals with many of the same ideas, concepts and criticisms that concerned some of the most important Modernist writers. And even though The New York Trilogy is labeled as a typical Postmodernist text, when comparing it to typical modernist texts in the form of Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) and Martinus Nijhoff’s Awater (1934) it becomes rather ambiguous to speak of a Post. This argument will further be supported by showing that Postmodern understanding of these concepts were already being explored in the two Modernist texts. Through this reading this article will argue that it is more accurate to speak of a expansion or radicalization of modernist thought that builds on what came before rather then moves away from them. The article will show that many of the themes explored in two typical Modernist texts are mirrored and in a typical “Post” modern novel, in the shape of Auster’s New York Trilogy and vice versa. For as Linda Hutcheon states; the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’ actively ‘incorporate that which they aim to contest by including and modifying the word ‘modern’ within themselves’ (1988:3)

Throughout modernity and through the influence of such prominent figures as Sigmund Freud, as well as Other psychologists and philosophers, perspectives and ideas on identity and individuality changed and became fragmented. No longer did people see themselves as a stable or a knowable being but rather as a fragmented and (at least partly) unstable being that could not be known completely (Malpas 2005). In Postmodernism this fragmentation and instability is often viewed as pushed further off balance into a completely fractured identity of wholly unstable and Self-referential fragments. A consequence of this fragmenting of identity is a crisis in our ability to fully understand the Self and Other and a breakdown of the concepts of “I” and “Other”. This in turn had far reaching consequences in art, culture and, not least of all, in literature. Paul Auster’s (1987) New York trilogy , Martinus Nijhof’s (1934) Awater and Gertrude Stein’s (1937) Everybody’s Autobiography are all, in their own ways, an exploration into these new concepts of identity and individuality, subjectivity and knowing.

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