“I lost track of time before these images, fell deep into their world, as if all the time between them and me had somehow vanished… When I eventually walked down the stairs and out of the museum, it was with the feeling of someone who had returned to the earth from a great distance” (Cole, 36).

The narrative of Open City is quite unique in that there does not seem to be many significant characters or major plot-lines. Rather, we follow Julius through the first four chapters with his thoughts in his daily adventures and interactions in New York City. As such, Open City reads more like a journal than a novel, with the author even choosing not to include quotations marks around dialogue. This initially made the story feel mundane for me, as so much of what Julius chooses to tell us seems so pointless and arbitrary. However, as I continued into his story, I realized there is a simplistic beauty in his recounts of his daily activities merely for the sake of sharing his thoughts without any greater purpose. For example, when reading the passage about his trance-like state when viewing art at a museum (a place where Julius only chose to enter on a whim and did not drive the plot discernibly forward), we get to hear how the art made him feel—and even feel it for ourselves—in a manner that was only possible due to the novel’s peculiar format, a collection of Julius’s thoughts.