ConclusionCity of my walks and joys!
City whom that I have lived and sung there will one day make you illustrious，
Not the pageants of you — not your shifting tableaux，your spectacles，repay me，
Not the interminable rows of your houses，nor the ships at the wharves，
Nor the processions in the streets，nor the bright windows with goods in theh learn’d persons，or bear my share in the soiree or feast；
Not those，but as I pass O Manhattan，your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love，
Offering response to my own — these repay ual lovers，only repay me.
— Walt Whitman (1860), “City of Orgies”
The use of flaneur as a literary device is pro in Poe and Baudelaire, while the analysis of flaneur in literary works is in Benjamin’s works. Benjamin himself, is a flaneur, who once wandered in the cities of Berlin, Paris and d recorded what he perceived during his flanerie. “Paris, the Capital of the 19th century, ” “On Some Motifs of Baudelaire ” and “the Arcades Project ” constitute a fraion of the flaneur, a person who merges with the crowd in his stroll of the city street, and yet does not lose his posure in his psychological promenade and physiognomy. What is ape and reflects on the events he witnesses, with the precondition that he must be sensitive enough. In Benjahree key words should not be neglected: “the crowd, ” “shock, ” and “allegory.” “The crowd” is viewed as the counterpart of the flaneur, however, it may provide a veil or even an asylum for the flaneur as a camouflage. “Shock” emphasizes the psychological experience of being startled by the outside world, be it an object or an event. In Benjamin’s sense, “shock” is the essence of modernity induced by both scientific and cultural development. “Allegory” used both by Benjamin and by Baudelaire, is not only a concept referring to a figure of speech, but also a concept referring to a way of aesthetic representation. As Baudelaire says in Les Paradis Artificiels (Paris 1917): “I will note, in passing, that allegory — long an object of our scorn because of maladroit painters, but in reality a most spiritual art forhe earliest and most natural forms of poetry — resumes its legitimate dominion in a mind illu” (Benjamin 1999:206). The word intoxication is mostly applied to the figure of flaneur whose wander in the city space is endowed with his engrossment, a kind of losing himself in the crowd and in the surrounding environ he sees everything. In that relaxed and yet vigilant state of mind, the flaneur, when narrating what he perceives, bees an allegorist. In this sense, Doctorow’s little wanderers are all allegorists. The saself.
In The Book of Daniel，the little wanderer Daniel perceives the world with a traumatized mind and antagonistic emotion. With a strong sense of homelessness，he carries on his father’s teaching of being a psychic alien，and delves into an unfathomable darkness of isolation. His flanerie in the city space is characterized with the earnestness for a home，with nostalgia for the past，and a strong inclination to escape from the childhood misery. For him，wandering is therapeutic. So what he perceives is no more than a group of fractured pieces of the city’s history. Nor is the cityscape a continuous and fulfilled picture of the plentiful and varied city life in New York. All is deterhildhood experience. So the plexion of him during his flanerie is dull，inert，and grotesque.