Author Philip K. Dick once said, "Sometimes going mad is an appropriate response to reality." The theme of the origin of madness is explored in all three stories that make up Paul Auster's novel The New York Trilogy. The three relatively short crime novels all explore similar themes and similar ideas, one of which is why people would go crazy in our society. In the first story, the reader sees Queen, the detective go crazy because she can't solve Stillman's case, which ultimately wasn't a mystery worth solving. In the second story, the reader sees private investigator Blue go crazy when he is paid simply to watch a man write all day, nothing else. In the third story, the narrator goes crazy trying to find his identity through his missing childhood friend. At the end of the novel, the reader may recognize that Paul Auster, in his three stories, is pointing out that since men have no real purpose, they will go mad. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay City of Glass tackles the theme of the existence of a purpose that leads to madness by presenting the writer Quinn with an investigative case. He is hired to follow Peter Stillman Sr, who has been in prison for locking up his son for several years. However, from the very beginning of the case we realized the senselessness of the case. This first appears when Quinn is about to begin his search for Stillman at the train station, and suddenly finds himself in trouble when two identical men with Stillman's face materialize from the trains. Quinn acknowledges that whoever he chose to follow “would have been arbitrary, a submission to chance” and that this “would haunt him to the end” (p.68). This shows how, even from the beginning of Quinn's pursuit, there is no real purpose. Everything might have been different if he had followed the other Stillman, defeating the purpose of Quinn's search for the truth. It doesn't exist in this case. After following various "roads" that lead Quinn nowhere other than imagining things like route maps and becoming Stillman's son himself, Quinn loses track of Stillman one night. He realizes in that moment that “He had nothing, he knew nothing [and that], he only knew that he knew nothing” (p. 125). After that, the book gets very dark, as Quinn goes to live in an alley across the street from Tillman Jr.'s apartment. He goes crazy, learning to live on as little food as possible and sleeping in 15-minute intervals. This shows that when Quinn realizes that she can't solve her case and that there's no meaning to what she's been trying to do all this time, she just goes crazy. It proves the fact that knowing nothing breaks the human spirit. Ghosts explores this same idea in a somewhat similar way. This time it follows a real private investigator named Blue, who is hired by White to watch Black from the other side of the window and write reports on what he does each week. In the begging, Blue begins to wonder about all the interesting things the case could entail, however he soon notices that the only action he would get would be watching Black write all day. In an absurd conversation where Black takes on Blue's role and explains to Blue what he does all day, he explains that his job is just to watch a man who "sits in his room all day and writes," he explains how this is enough to “drive you crazy” (p. 214). This shows how in his quest to discover the truth about the case, he only finds absurdity, which in turn drives him crazy. This becomes a metaphor for life through history. The moment when.