Postmodernist Elements In City Of Glass And In The Skin Of A Lion

City of Glass by Paul Auster and In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje are two completely different novels that have certain features in common. Both novels are postmodernist fiction and they both evolve around a big city with a main character that is in search of his identity.

Quinn, the main character in City of Glass, is an author who takes on different identities while he at the same time goes on a quest for his own identity. This is a postmodernist element which has to do with the postmodernist view of people, i.e. that people and cities are a construction made by humans (SjÐ"¶strand). The city itself plays an important part in the story, if not the most important part. The city of New York is portrayed as a protagonist in the novel. Quinn walks through the city as if it is a big maze and while walking he becomes one with the city. His journey in New York further strengthens the fact that Quinn is in search of his own identity. Throughout the story the reader gets the feeling that it is the city that inhabits the character, not the opposite. In the novel In the Skin of a Lion the story evolves around the city of Toronto. Toronto is not a protagonist in the same way that New York is in City of Glass, but the city is very important to the story. The main character Patrick who has no purpose with his life seeks his home in the big city and this is also where he finds his identity, true self and love.

In the Skin of a Lion is a story that is told as if there are several different stories within the one story. The centre of the story is Patrick and his life but his life is not told in a linear way. The narrator jumps between new scenes where new characters are introduced. This can be quite confusing at times. The story is full of discordance and fragmentation and for the reader it is hard to see how all these different stories will come together. However, in the end most of the characters in the different chapters are pulled together and we also find out that the narrator herself is a character in the story that has been told. Auster also uses these postmodernist features of fragmentation and discordance with random events happening in the story that the reader has to decipher oneself. Fragmentation also has a lot to do with identity in City of Glass where the character Quinn goes through a fragmentation of his identity.

Intertextual elements play an important part in both Ondaatje’s and Austers’s novels. City of Glass is filled with intertextual references such as Moby Dick, (Auster, p.51), that indicates that Quinn is on a chase for something unknown, Marco Polo’s Travel, (p.6), that is linked to Quinn’s travels around New York City. Then we also have the intertextual reference of Don Quixote, i.e. “he wondered why he had the same initials as Don Quixote” (p.130). The reference to Don Quixote is repeated throughout the novel and Quinn’s character turns out to be a “lunatic” just like Don Quixote. The intertextual references in City of Glass are linked to Quinn’s character in one way or another.

In In the Skin of a Lion the intertextual references are used somewhat differently than in Auster’s novel. The intertexts are used to set the mood of the events in the story and to bring the different characters together. Ondaatje intertexts include newspapers, i.e. The Racing News (Ondaatje p. 124), radio love songs (p.133), letters of Joseph Conrad (p.140), Chaplin films (p.144), theatre performances (p. 59), etc. Ondaatje further gives acknowledgements at the end of his novel for the permission of reprinting lyrics and sentences written by other writers and songwriters. One of these acknowledgements refers to the song lyrics from “Up Jumped You with Love”, “Needed no star Wanted no moon Always thought it too dumb… Then all at once Up jumped you With love.” (p.153). This reference symbolises how Patrick has found his true love which also has set the grounds for his identity.

Another important postmodernism element in both books is the narrative, “who tells us what, and why…? (Post modernism in Literature). Ondaatje starts his novel