In this essay I will discuss narrative order, narrative pacing and narrative coherence in relation to Paul Auster's "City of Glass". I will also explain how narrative coherence helped me read and understand the novel City of Glass. "City of Glass" by Paul Auster is a novel about a writer, Daniel Quinn, who writes crime stories. Narrative order is described in two ways, order of form and order of content. The description of Quinn's life in the first chapter of the story is an example of both the order of content and the order of form. The order of form is the order in which the events of the novel are represented to the reader, while the order of content is the order in which these events occurred. Quinn is a thirty-five year old man who has lost both his wife and his only child. He has been living his life in the past since the beginning of O'Donoghue 2, so he creates a new character called William Wilson to try to forget his past and his deceased loved ones and writes his books under this new name. He wrote a book a year and this provided him with enough money to live modestly in a small New York apartment. For the rest of the year he read many novels, looked at paintings and went to the cinema. In the summer he watched baseball and in the winter he went to the opera. He also loved walking and walked around the city every day, regardless of the weather. (Auster, The New York City of Glass Trilogy, 3). The author describes Quinn's daily life in the correct order of events, starting from the death of his family to what he does year-round ever since, including the creation of the character of William Wilson. He doesn't jump from the present to the past, he writes it in chronological order. Narrative pace speeds up or slows down a narrative. If two important events are described... in the middle of the paper... I need to know more and what exactly is going on in Quinn's mind. If a reader knows about narrative coherence before starting to read City of Glass, then he or she will know to pay attention to every little detail in the text. Because I had a prior understanding of this, I found reading this book a little more interesting because I had to try to figure out what information was critical to the plot of the story and the end result. If I didn't know what narrative coherence was, I probably would have struggled to put all the information together on my own without relying on the narrator to put it together for me. In conclusion, from my reading and writing this essay on 'City of Glass' and from studying narrative content, pacing and coherence I have learned how crucial these elements are when writing and reading a story.