Eye Just Don't Know Anymore

"The question is the story itself and whether or not it means something is for the story to tell" (2.8-9).

A few panels later, our narrator tells us that what Quinn liked about mysteries was " . . . their economy. There is no sentence or word that is not significant . . . Everything is essence: The center of the book shifts, is everywhere and no circumference can be drawn until the end" (7.2-5).

Unlike in genre hard boiled detective stories, though the central mystery in City of Glass is essentially unsolvable. By the end of the book we have a harder time drawing a circumference than we did at the outset. One even has a hard time even putting a finger on what exactly the mystery is. At the crux of this dilemma is our inability to wrap our heads around the narrator and what's at stake for him. Typically we're used to our detectives giving the "voice over": In Chandler we have Marlowe to orient us. Hammet provides Sam Spade or the Continental Op. Though the milieus into which these authors thrust their detectives are confusing and frought with red herrings, we are with them every step of the way. Their disorientation is ours as is their triumph over it. Not so with Quinn, suffering a private madness on which the narrator can really shed no light. This leaves the reader to try to puzzle matters out for himself, a potential exercise in futility or "shell game" especially when taking into consideration the quote with which I began this post.

I'd like to conlude with another (rather lengthy) quote, this from the novel City of Glass and leave open the question of whether it can shed some light on the graphic novel especially in regards to the mystery of the narrator:

"The detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through the morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangable. The reader sees the world through the detective's eyes, experiencing the proliferation of details for the first time. He has become awake to the things around him . . . Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was the letter "i" standing for investigator, it was "I" in the upper case, the tiny life bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him."