주체와 욕망 - 환상 : 폴 오스터의 『유리의 도시』

Subject and Its Desire - Fantasy in Paul Auster's City of Glass

Marlow’s The purpose of this paper is to examine Paul Auster's City of Glass according to Slavoj Žižek's reading of Jacques Lacan. This paper discusses chiefly the symbolic place of subject and its desire-fantasy responding to the Other's lack by analyzing the characters in City of Glass. Chapter Ⅱ explains the subject as 'a void, an empty place in the signifier's structure' by the interpretation of the hero Daniel Quinn's the given symbolic place. Quinn is connected to the symbolic order as the signifier William Wilson and Max Work. He is also mistaken for the detective Paul Auster by Peter Stillman, Jr. and his wife. These facts prove that Quinn is given a place by the others in the intersubjective network of symbolic relations irrespective of his real properties and capacities. In Chapter Ⅲ, subject's desire-fantasy responding to the Other's lack is proved by Quinn's chase of Peter Stillman, Sr. who looks for a pure language in order to restore the corrupt world. For Peter Stillman, Sr., the pure language is the subject's desire-fantasy object for filling in the lack of the Other. But it is 'nothingness' which can not be filled in by subject, so Peter Stillman, Sr. finally kills himself in order to conceal the lack and inexistence of the Other. For Quinn, the writing reveals his desire-fantasy. Quinn tries to give consistency in the Other by his writing. All his efforts, however, end in failure. Confronted with the lack of the Other, he also repeats the struggle for filling in it and then sacrifices himself for the Other like Peter Stillman, Sr. Therefore, this study concludes that Quinn and Peter Stillman, Sr. show the uneasy condition of subject that if the structure to support their fantasies becomes weakened, they are doomed to face the fear of the lack of the Other, and that they cannot give themselves the possibility of a new subject experiencing and recognizing the emptiness which is exactly the lack of the Other by 'going through the fantasy' as Žižek said.