One of Auster's many philosophical insights that he brings forth in The New York Trilogy is the observation that the self - and the narrative that is essential to the self - is not merely subject to change in time, but in space.
In his first Critique, Kant claims that the two pure intuitions, time and space, possess a sort of spatial character - the former being internal in nature, the latter being external in nature. There is a tacit dualism here - the mind as something internal, an "inside" that cannot even be appropriately conceived in terms of space at all (which of course begs the naive question "inside" of what? Not the body, since to occupy the body would make the mind part of the body, externality), the body, on the other hand is mere externality, a being with extension in space.
The previous passage from Auster can either be read as a departure or a confirmation of Kant's original claim - either the self is an externality, a space, a body, changing in space, or according to the contrary reading it is "nothing" once it becomes mere externality. It ceases to be a self at all, it becomes reified, but not exactly immutable. Like a piece of flotsam that is altered by the changing seas upon which it floats, it is altered by its movement through various spaces, but it has no power to shape itself, or to direct its course.
A scene in the first season of the hit television show Mad Men comes to mind - after Peter reveals Don's secret identity as Dick Whitman, Cooper recites a Japanese proverb: "A man is whatever room he is in." There is subtle, yet important difference in Cooper's words than our common knowledge that "a man is not who was so many years ago" or "he isn't who he once was." It begs the question: does self-hood not only require a narrative across time, a temporality, as the existentialists pointed out, but also a spatial understanding? Heidegger and Sartre conceived of space in reference to time; spatiality was dependent upon temporality. But is this necessarily the case?
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