Open City

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-5

Part 1, Chapters 6-11

Part 2, Chapters 12-16

Part 2, Chapters 17-21

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Birds

Birds appear as an important symbol throughout the novel. Their migrations reflect the migrations of immigrants like Julius. In other words, birds symbolize human immigrants. On the first page of the novel, he notes how he “had fallen into the habit of watching bird migrations” (3). In Part 2, he notices a “flock of tiny birds—they might have been starlings” (174) while walking in Central Park. Starlings are another “invasive” species in the Americas, and one with a literary origin, since they are said to have been imported by a group of Victorian bird enthusiasts who wanted to populate the American landscape with every species of bird mentioned in Shakespeare.

The novel ends with a meditation on birds. Julius, on a boat touring around the Statue of Liberty, thinks about how some “birds [...] lost their bearings when faced with a single monumental flame” (258). These migrating birds are killed by a symbol of America’s purported openness to immigrants. This passage symbolizes how American freedom (the Statue of Liberty) comes at the cost of the lives of immigrants (the birds). Julius recalls statistics recorded in 1888 by Augustus Tassin, and “the sense persisted that something more troubling was at work” (259). This reflects how anti-immigrant sentiments can be phrased as statistics, but numbers don’t explore underlying prejudices.

Vision

Another motif and symbol is vision. Vision develops the theme of Race, Ethnicity, and Difference. It also is used to symbolically describe the practice of psychiatry. When Julius goes to see a poetry reading by a Polish poet who discusses “persecution” while the “lights bounced off his glasses, making it appear as though he had a large white patch over each eye” (43). He looks as though he cannot see, or like he has a “blind spot.” The “blind spot” is at the center of Cole’s symbolic use of vision. When considering psychiatry, Julius thinks, “I have felt most of the work of psychiatrists in particular, and mental health professionals in general, was a blind spot so broad that it had taken over most of the eye. What we knew [...] was so much less than what remained in darkness” (239).

Julius refers to the “blind spot” again at the end of the novel. When Julius accidentally ends up on a fire escape at Carnegie Hall, he looks up at the stars, and wishes he “could meet the unseen starlight halfway, starlight that was unreachable because my entire being was caught up in a blind spot [...] My hands held metal, my eyes starlight, and it was as though I had come so close to something that it had fallen out of focus or fallen so far away from it that it had faded” (257). The “blind spot” includes all of Julius at this moment. Humans cannot see newer stars that are very far away—they are in an astronomical “blind spot.” In other words, humans are limited in what they can see of the human mind, as well as the cosmos.

Memory

Memory is a motif in the novel that develops the theme of Physical and Mental Wandering. Julius connects memory with mental competency, and views loss of memory as part of the aging process. This viewpoint is partially inspired by his psychiatric work with the elderly. When he forgets the pin code for his bank card, he “[is] awed by this unsuspected area of fragility in myself, the kind I tended to smile at in others, the kind I took as a mark of vanity” (162). The novel clearly establishes Julius as forgetting important details before the plot twist.

The plot twist is that Julius has forgotten his sexual encounter with Moji in Nigeria, which she says was not consensual. When they meet by chance on the street, some time before her accusation, he does not even recognize her. He considers W. H. Auden’s claim that history would look kindly on the poet Paul Claudel, despite his bigoted views, because of the beauty of his verse. Julius “wondered if indeed it was that simple, if time was so free with memory, so generous with pardons, that writing done well could come to stand in the place of an ethical life” (144-45). This reflects how the reader may or may not view the character of Julius after the plot twist.