Critical Analysis Sample

Teju Cole’s Open City and the Ultimate Unreliable Narrator

Early in Teju Cole’s Open City, the narrator, Julius, ends one of his meandering walks through Manhattan by visiting an old, ailing professor he has kept in touch with. As the two chat about early English literature and a patient of Julius’ who faces a dilemma from his conservative Christian family, the open window lets in sounds of the New York City marathon. This vibrant swathe of life, with so many details and specifics swirling in a small space, is representative of the whole book. Julius spends his life ambling through other lives, colliding with humans from all over the world, no matter where he happens to be. His mind is an open receptacle for minutiae about classical music and painting, critical and political theory, and the experiences of others – though not, we start to realize, in equal measure.

There are superbly done episodes in this book, in which Julius converses with a prisoner from Liberia, an older woman from the intellectual scene in Belgium, and a young man studying critical theory while working in an internet cafe, among others. The world opens up in these passages, thrillingly, filled in with copious details of the cosmopolitan and many-layered world of identity, language, history, literature, politics, and seemingly anything at all. The details make these passages feel like sitting in on a college lecture in a class which one isn’t taking for a grade: one gets to simply dip one’s foot into the rich river of ideas and experiences.

There’s a sense of oddness, however, that begins to build as the novel progresses. Julius is a psychologist near the end of his training, and yet few of his many musings involve human psychology or reference the vast academic field he is professionally training in. This could be chalked up to Julius wanting to pursue other interests outside of work, and yet a mind as curious as his would seem to want to meditate on whatever it was pointed toward, indiscriminately. So why does he meditate so rarely on human motivation, on emotions, on what makes people tick? Instead, he seems to dwell in a curious state of absence when it comes to other people. Early in the novel, he meets his neighbor and learns that the neighbor’s wife has died recently, and he “had known nothing of it.” During another visit to his professor friend, he “[becomes] like one who was no longer there” and “continue[s] the conversation…while perfectly distracted”. His romantic relationship fades away like a wave receding. He seems to dance around people, rather than connecting with them. His preference for facts and details about the history of classical music, say, over a curiosity about others’ emotional lives, becomes telling.

As Julius’ own backstory becomes clear, it adds to this sense of his detachment from others. His Nigerian father’s death of tuberculosis left him and his German mother disconnected, “our stoicism…disunited”, “our glances full of dark rooms.” In a moment of vulnerability, his mother attempts to connect with Julius by telling him the story of her childhood, but Julius “had no feeling for the stories she was telling or the longing behind them.” He says, “I couldn’t see why she was telling me about her girlhood, about pianos and blueberries.” His relationship with his mother has broken down, but it’s not clear why. Halfway through the book, Julius decides to travel to Brussels to find his grandmother, though he has no real way to find her, not having her info and not wanting to contact his mother. In fact, he doesn’t know if she’s still alive. It seems that the search for his grandmother was an excuse to travel, since he never makes more than meager attempts to look her up.

These incidents add up as the details pour in, with no indication towards any particular angle or direction of the plot; the book appears to be merely incidental in nature, until one particular subplot finds its conclusion. A woman named Moji, whom Julius knows from years ago in Nigeria, meets Julius again as an adult in New York, and they start an ambiguous friendship. Near the very end of the novel, Moji reveals what has motivated her this whole time: she has wanted to talk to him about the time he took advantage of her, when she was drunk at a party during their adolescence. 

The revelation of this narrator as a rapist is jarring enough, but then, in the most brazen use of narrator unreliability I have ever seen, Julius simply relates Moji’s accusation and her feelings about it directly, with zero commentary. He hears what she has to say, leaves the scene, and does not mention it again. Instead, he returns to his musings and meanderings.

This twist, so late in the novel, turns the book on its head. It affects the entire character, the entire book – in fact, it threatens to swallow them. Moji’s accusation hinges on the fact that she knows he will not want to acknowledge what happened in any way, will not want to hear her or process her story or her pain – and this is exactly what happens. Cole gives us no reason to mistrust Moji’s account, and every reason to doubt Julius. The reader might recall other incidents of Julius ignoring women’s pain, such as the attempted bonding with his mother, as well as an earlier incident when Julius was riding in a car to school and the driver hit and possibly killed a young girl. Years later, Julius thinks of the incident as “something I had dreamed about, or heard in a telling by someone else.” His dissociative pattern has become clear.

Though it’s a fascinating way to structure a novel, forcing us to radically reassess the character of the narrator we’ve been listening to for hundreds of pages, somewhat like a detective sizing up a suspect after hearing about the murder, this device unfortunately rests on the dismissal of women’s pain. This is why it brings the book down with more weight than it can carry. Cole’s novel can be seen as a study of the absence at the center of a person’s character, the avoidance one cultivates in order to maintain daily functioning, but the use of Moji’s rape to achieve this leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. Moji’s whole point is that her experience has been erased, because of Julius’ lack of acknowledgment, and the book simply re-enacts this erasure. In fact, in reviews of this book, many reviewers shy away from mentioning this crucial plot point (perhaps to avoid spoiling it), which effaces and diminishes Moji’s pain even further, burying it under observations about the novel’s intellectual style and subject matter. 

True, Moji is a fictional character, and can’t be hurt by reviews of the book. But her experience is common enough among real women, who have had their stories erased and their truths invalidated by others. It’s hard to stomach this being used as a plot device, which deepens Julius’ character at the cost of Moji’s pain. If the erasure of women’s pain is a set of narratives that already exist plentifully in the real world, what exactly is the purpose of putting that narrative down on paper yet again, without changing or challenging it? Why reify it by giving it yet another voice? Why not write something else?