Post #2: The Metaphor of the Maze in Paul Auster's City of Glass

Chapter 1: Intermedial Relations, p. 14

One of the main characteristics of comics is its juxtaposition of the verbal and the visual texts, which designates Mixmedia texts. A Mixmedia text “contains complex signs in different media that would not reach coherence or self-sufficiency outside that context” (Clüver, “Estudos Interartes” 8). The juxtaposition of verbal and visual texts in comics offers the reader a third layer of meaning, as in the metaphor of the maze in Paul Auster's City of Glass, the graphic novel by Mazzuchelli and Karasik.

Paul Auster's City of Glass, page 4

In the graphic novel, the image of the buildings in New York is transformed into a maze and, later on, into one’s fingerprint on the window of Quinn’s house. This visual metaphor provides two subtexts: the fact that Quinn feels lost in New York (the maze as a metaphor for being lost) and the fact that the character has lost his identity after his wife’s and son’s deaths (the fingerprint as a metaphor for identity) and has been living through the lives of others.