Let The Great World Spin Character Analysis

It is firstly interesting to see that the polyphony of characters within Let the Great World Spin works perfectly for a description of the landscape of 1970s New York and this view is supported by Michael Lukas when he describes them as a “collection of conflicting voices” Within an urban landscape we are often interdependent on those around us and McCann explores this idea by having all the main narrators connected to each other in a Guare-esque six degrees of separation way. McCann allows an accurate exploration of the landscape by letting us see it through the eyes of eleven different narrators ranging from a prostitute walking the streets of the Bronx all the way through to the high end judge that prosecutes her for her discretions. By …show more content…
McCann highlights the importance of polyphony when in the novel it says ““People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.” For McCann, It is this very need to see things from the first person to truly understand the landscape and the lives of the people. Similarly in a 1927 letter to Otto Kahn, Crane states that each section of The Bridge “is a separate canvas, as it were, yet none yields its entire significance when seen apart from the others. One might take the Sistine Chapel as an analogy”. It is clear from this that both writers believe that the subjectivity of our own experiences can limit an overall appreciation of an urban landscape and it is only through a wider exploration that we can gain a true understanding of a …show more content…
Jaslyn is born in New York but leaves the metropolis when she becomes an adult to further her career yet upon return she still feels a deep connection with the city and in many ways it is as if she had never left. Auster describes the landscape as having a similar impact when his protagonist Nathan Glass states that after many years away, “he instinctively found himself crawling towards his neighbourhood”. Both writers are describing how we can have intimate connections with our surroundings often becoming microcosms of the very landscape we inhabit. The epithet generally attached to New Yorkers of being a loud and busy group of people is only given because these people really are the embodiment of the very loud and busy city they live in, taking up the traits of their landscape. Petit’s statement that “this was the city he had crawled into – he was surprised to find edges beneath his own edge” just goes further in displaying how the landscape we live in can teach us new things about ourselves and really invigorate us. Auster even goes as far to describe one of his characters as simply an “urban man” and state that “the man was made for the city” which adds weight to the idea of a deep connection between the individual and