52 pages • 1-hour read
City of Glass
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Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse, child death, mental illness, death by suicide, and death.
Chapter 10 Summary
With Stillman gone, Quinn considers his options. He decides it is time to come clean to the real Paul Auster about his impersonation and ask for help. He finds the only Paul Auster in the phone book and walks to his apartment.
He buzzes at the door, and Paul Auster answers, letting him in. Quinn explains his situation, but Paul Auster is confused. He is not a private detective but an author. They suspect that a mistake with the phone wiring led to Quinn receiving a call meant for Auster, but that does not explain why anyone would think Auster was a private detective in the first place.
As they talk, Quinn gives Auster the check he received from Virginia. Auster says it is Quinn’s money, no matter whose name is on the check. He promises to deposit the check and give Quinn the cash later. Meanwhile, neither has any idea what to do about the Stillman case.
Auster explains the book he is working on, which is a literary analysis of Don Quixote, in which he examines the authorship of the book. He explains the complex layers of the novel: The author of the novel, Cervantes, claims that he did not write the novel but merely edited it from someone else’s manuscript. He claims that this manuscript was written in Arabic by a fictional author, Cid Hamete Benengeli, who witnessed Don Quixote’s exploits, and then translated into the Spanish version that Cervantes read and edited.
However, Auster argues that the character Benengeli never appears in the story and therefore cannot be the eyewitness. Instead, he argues that the eyewitness is Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s loyal squire, who then dictated the story to other characters in the novel. Quinn asks why Don Quixote’s friends would do this. Auster argues that it was all part of an effort to “cure Don Quixote of his madness” by highlighting his irrational behavior and showing him the error of his ways (98). Auster then concludes that Don Quixote may have orchestrated the whole thing himself to “test the gullibility of his fellow men” (98).
Their conversation ends when Auster’s wife and son arrive home. Auster’s wife’s name is Siri, and his son’s name is Daniel. Quinn and the boy joke about being the same. Quinn is jealous of Auster and his family, who remind him of the wife and son he lost. Finally, he decides to leave. Auster promises to call him when he has the cash.
Chapter 11 Summary
Quinn walks home. He has no more plans or ideas. He feels like he knows nothing and has nothing. He decides to quit and calls Virginia to inform her. However, the number is busy. Several times over the night and the next morning, he tries to call, only to find the line busy. The next day, he walks the New York streets, losing himself in the anonymous crowds. He finally sits and writes in his red notebook.
In his notes, he reflects on the invisible people who fill the streets: panhandlers, buskers, and unhoused people. He imagines the streets of New York as a physical space where people can disappear, and others become “locked inside madness” (107).
He tries again to call Virginia, with no success. He concludes that fate will not allow him to quit the task that he promised to complete. If he cannot contact Virginia, he must continue working as he sees fit, without her input. He empties his bank account, taking all the cash. Then he walks to Peter and Virginia’s apartment complex and settles in an alley across the street where he can watch the entrance.
Chapter 12 Summary
Time passes while Quinn watches from the alley. Weeks or months go by, but he does not move. He never sees Peter or Virginia. Slowly, he adapts to living in the alley. He learns how to survive on less food and sleeps in tiny intervals. He hides behind trash cans to avoid detection. He spends many hours watching the sky, cataloguing the movement of clouds and shifting colors. He writes in his red notebook. Finally, his money runs out.
The narrative shifts to a journalistic tone, in which the narrator states that he has confirmed the date when Quinn emerges from the alley as between the 12th and 25th of August, based on Quinn’s notebook and independent research. At that point, Quinn wanders out with no clear plan. No one notices him on the street. He is weak and walks with a slow, awkward rhythm. He does not recognize his own face in a window’s reflection. Desperate, he calls Auster to ask for the money he was promised.
Auster says he cannot give Quinn the money because the check bounced. Quinn does not believe him. He insists he needs the money to continue the case. Shocked, Auster says the Stillman case is over. Stillman died by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge two months earlier. Auster does not know what happened to Peter and Virginia.
Stunned, Quinn hangs up. He calls Virginia’s number, but it has been disconnected. Quinn walks to his apartment, but when he enters, everything is different. A young woman walks in and threatens to call the police. The woman says that the previous tenant disappeared and stopped paying rent, so the complex leased the apartment to her. She threatens to call the police again, and he leaves.
Chapter 13 Summary
Quinn eventually finds himself at Peter and Virginia’s apartment complex. He is unsurprised when the door is unlocked. He wanders into the back room, strips off his clothes, and throws them out the window. Then he lies down beside his red notebook and sleeps.
The room is dark when he wakes. He does not know what time it is. He feels that day and night have lost all meaning. He decides he does not want to leave the room. He thinks about his detective novels and feels that his character, Max Work, has died at some point, in between cases. He no longer cares. He sleeps again.
The next time he wakes up, sunshine comes in through the window. To his surprise, there is a tray of food on the floor near him. He eats and then writes in his red notebook until the sunlight fades. When it is fully dark, he sleeps. When he wakes, it is light outside again, and there is another tray of food beside him. He eats and then writes.
In his notebook, he thinks about his mistakes. He wonders why he took Auster’s word that the check bounced or that Stillman was dead. He thinks about Don Quixote and why they have the same initials. He wonders what it would look like if someone drew maps of all the steps he had taken in his life, and what word they would spell.
The same routine continues. He sleeps when it is dark, wakes to sunlight and a tray of food, and then writes until the light fades again. The periods of sunlight grow shorter. Eventually, he barely has time to finish eating and write a sentence or two before the room is dark again. At first, he attributes this to the seasons, the days growing shorter as winter approaches, but even after winter should have ended, the intervals of light do not lengthen again.
He is nearly out of room in his notebook and writes less to stretch it out. He wonders if he could learn to write without paper and pen, “if he could learn to speak instead, filling the darkness with his voice, speaking the words into the air, into the walls” (129). His last sentence in the notebook reads, “What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?” (129).
The narrative shifts to the narrator’s journalistic tone. He reports that after this, he is unsure of events. The narrator, an unnamed “I,” recalls that he had been on a trip to Africa. When he returned, he spoke to his friend Auster, who told him the strange story of Daniel Quinn. The narrator was angry with Auster for not doing more to help Quinn, who was clearly in some kind of trouble.
They decide to search for Quinn, at last arriving at the Stillmans’ apartment, in hope of clues. They find the apartment unlocked and empty, except for a red notebook left on the floor. Auster recognizes it as Quinn’s and asks the narrator to hold on to it. The narrator has tried to piece together the events using Quinn’s notebook but acknowledges that it can only ever be half of the full story. He thinks about Quinn often and hopes that he is well, wherever he has disappeared to.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
In Chapter 10, Stillman’s disappearance also takes away a large part of Quinn’s identity, not only his PI Paul Auster persona (which he loses by virtue of failing his assignment) but also the part of his identity directly tied to Stillman himself. Quinn previously made clear in Chapter 8 that they are connected, observing that Stillman’s red notebook, so similar to his own, “formed a secret link between them” (59). In Chapter 10, he reflects that losing track of Stillman feels “as though he [has] lost half of himself” (91). Quinn has crafted an identity around the role of PI, a role that is contingent on Stillman’s presence. If Stillman is gone, Quinn’s PI identity is gone as well, demonstrating the novella’s representation of Identity as Constructed and Contingent.
Additionally, Stillman’s disappearance forces Quinn to approach the “real” Paul Auster, which further exacerbates his fragmentation. He is forced to relinquish his identity as Paul Auster, but worse yet, he discovers that the “real” Paul Auster is not a PI at all but a writer like him. This revelation shatters the story upon which Quinn has constructed one aspect of his increasingly fragile sense of identity. Now, he is not Paul Auster, but neither is he Daniel Quinn. In response, he tries to give up the case entirely, but in an ironic twist on his previous telephone calls, his inability to reach Virginia forces him into action. He interprets the probable coincidence of Virginia’s busy phone signal as a sign from fate that he must continue the case. Ironically, he later discovers in Chapter 13 that Peter and Virginia are gone. Likely, they have been gone since his attempt to contact them in Chapter 11, which means he could have ended the case months earlier, rendering his actions and PI identity even more purposeless.
In previous chapters, the narrative played with minor metafictional elements, such as literary allusions, to subtly reveal its own textual nature. In the final chapters, however, the metafictional elements become central to the plot, starting with Paul Auster’s arrival in Chapter 10 and ending with the unknown narrator in Chapter 13. The character of Paul Auster is a double of the real-life author of City of Glass, drawn from real biographical details of the author’s life. Paul Auster’s real-life wife is named Siri, as in the novella, and he did have a son named Daniel. Moreover, Auster based the novella on a real-life experience in which he received a phone call from someone trying to contact the Pinkerton Detective Agency (Siegumfeldt, Inge Birgitte. “Paul Auster: I Don’t Even Know if The New York Trilogy is Very Good.” Literary Hub, 2 Oct 2017). However, the character Paul Auster is ultimately still a fictional character similar to, but separate from, the real-life author, who uses this metafictional element to further question the notion of identity.
Furthermore, the character Paul Auster’s analysis of Don Quixote serves to further expose the structures of City of Glass’s own metafictional narrative through intertextuality. In Don Quixote, the real-life author, Cervantes, claims that the novel is his translation of a manuscript by Cid Hamete Benengeli. This was a popular trope in early novels of the 1600-1700s, when novels were a new literary form: Authors created an air of authenticity by claiming the (real) author was merely an editor or translator for the (fictional) author of found manuscripts. Reevaluating the novella with this connection in mind, City of Glass accrues another level of meaning as a pastiche of Don Quixote, imitating several of its features. Daniel Quinn shares the same initials as Don Quixote, and he also enacts Don Quixote’s delusional efforts to live within the stories he loves (mysteries in Quinn’s case, rather than medieval romances). Furthermore, the unknown narrator who suddenly appears in the final pages of Chapter 13 is a pastiche of Benengeli. Just as Benengeli chronicles Don Quixote’s adventures without ever being present in them, so, too, does the unknown narrator recount Quinn’s story, claiming to have gathered the facts from the red notebook. Additionally, Quinn’s mimicking of Quixote adds yet another textual layer to his fragmentary identity.
In the final two chapters, the themes of identity as constructed and contingent and Invisibility in a Postmodern City. With his various identities in crisis, Quinn attempts to fade into the city just like the “beggars and performers” and “hulks of despair” he observes in Chapter 11 (107). He once walked the streets, noting the ways some souls become “locked inside madness—unable to exit the world that stands at the threshold of their bodies” (107). Now, instigated by the loss of his identity, he becomes one of these very souls. Though he continues his case, he no longer functions as either Paul Auster or Daniel Quinn. Instead, he becomes invisible, hiding in the alley outside the Stillmans’ apartment “as though he [has] melted into the walls of the city” (114). No passersby notice him during this time, as he is rendered invisible by his isolation. Lost within the postmodern dreamscape of the city, he becomes truly alienated from others and himself; when he emerges from the alley, he does not recognize his own reflection. Quinn’s isolation and his fracturing sense of self feed each other cyclically.
When he learns that Stillman is dead and the case is over, the last piece of his identity, that of Peter’s protector, finally breaks as well. Each facet of his identity was a pastiche cobbled together from the narratives around him, but now these stories are gone. Even Max Work has died “somewhere on the way to his next case” (126). The only thing he has left is the red notebook. In Chapter 13, Quinn surrenders to this destruction of his identity and hides in the empty apartment. Without a text to direct his actions, he simply stops moving. The final passages of the novella leave the ending ambiguous: Quinn is gone, but it is unclear where or how. However, as the days and his writing time grow shorter and shorter, the narrative suggests that when he reaches the end of the red notebook, he reaches the end of himself as well, as if erased from the text itself. Like every other character in the novella, he disappears into the city, leaving the unknown narrator with a fragmentary text and no conclusions.
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