52 pages • 1-hour read
City of Glass
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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse and mental illness.
Chapter 4 Summary
Quinn thinks about Peter’s case. He has heard of similar cases before. The writings of Herodotus describe an Egyptian pharaoh who isolated two infants and later claimed that they spontaneously learned to speak Phrygian. In the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II tried to repeat the experiment, hoping to discover the true language of humans, but the children died. The French essayist Montaigne speculated that humans should have a naturally arising language like animals do, but he has not seen proof that it has been found.
Additionally, Quinn recalls cases of children isolated by accident, such as Peter of Hanover, a “wild child” in 18th-century Germany who never learned to speak. There was also Victor, the “wild boy of Aveyron” (34), who learned rudimentary speech. Finally, there was Kaspar Hauser, who was found in Nuremberg in 1828. He could not speak and acted like an infant. He learned some language but never became a functioning adult. He eventually recovered memories of being kept in a dark room by a man. Years later, he was murdered by an unknown man in a public park.
Quinn decides that he will do what he can to protect Peter from a similar fate at his father’s hands. He could not save his own son but hopes to save this one. He realizes that he is influenced by the fact that Peter was also his son’s name.
Chapter 5 Summary
That night, Quinn walks to a nearby diner to eat. The man behind the counter chats with him as he eats. They have had similar conversations in the past, though they do not know each other’s names or anything about their lives. They discuss baseball and their love for the New York Mets. The man jokes that Quinn should be the team’s manager because he knows more than the people in charge. Quinn responds, “[Y]ou bet your bottom dollar” (38).
On his way home, he buys a plain red notebook, feeling inexplicably drawn to it. When he returns home, he examines the photograph of Stillman and tries to imagine what the man would look like now, writing his thoughts about Stillman and the case in the red notebook. He recalls the detective C. Auguste Dupin the Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and tries to think analytically in the same way. He wonders if Virginia kissed him to distract him from the strange circumstances of her marriage to Peter and wonders whether she might be collaborating with Stillman somehow. He ends his notes with a note to remember who he is and who is pretending to be. He writes, “[W]ho are you? And if you think you know, why do you keep lying about it? I have no answer. All I can say is this: listen to me. My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name” (40).
Chapter 6 Summary
Quinn spends the following morning at the Columbia University library, studying the book that Stillman published, “The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World” (41). The first half of the book focuses on explorers like Columbus and Raleigh. According to Stillman, when these explorers found America, they believed they had found a second Garden of Eden. Stillman argues that “the discovery of the New World was the quickening impulse of utopian thought, the spark that gave hope to the perfectibility of human life” (42), including the idea that America could become a perfect theocratic state.
The second half of the book discusses “the fall,” using Milton’s Paradise Lost as the primary text. Stillman argues that the fall of man from the Garden also caused the “fall of language” as “names became detached from things” (43). Stillman then shifts to the story of the Tower of Babel, in which he argues that the fall of the tower represented a second fall of language. He argues that the Tower was built 340 years after the Flood and signified man’s attempts to reach or surpass God. During this time, all humanity spoke one language, allowing them to work together. To punish them, God destroyed the Tower, and the single language was split into many.
Next, Stillman’s book discusses a Boston clergyman named Henry Dark, who was once John Milton’s private secretary. According to Stillman, Henry Dark wrote a pamphlet entitled The New Babel, in which he argues for building a new paradise in America. He claims that utopia is not a place to be found but an idea that lives in humans and must be built by them. Following the logic that humanity’s fall from innocence was also a fall from language, he argues that if they can recreate the original language spoken in the Garden of Eden, restoring it to its natural order, they can simultaneously restore humans’ prelapsarian innocence. He also argues that just as the Tower of Babel was built 340 years after the Flood, this new Babel will begin 340 years after the Mayflower arrived in the New World. This means that the foundations will be placed in the year 1960.
Quinn stops reading. He recalls that 1960 is the year that Stillman first locked Peter away in a dark room. He writes notes in his red notebook and then leaves, preparing to find Stillman at the train station and follow him.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The pace in these chapters is slow and methodical as the narrative builds. Quinn enacts his role as a private investigator with tedious but important research, another detective novel trope. Many detective novels depict the detective’s investigative procedures in meticulous detail, as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which rely heavily on his research and analytical skills. This strategy highlights the hard work that goes into real-world investigation, slows the pace, and increases tension and anticipation.
In City of Glass, these scenes of research also provide details about the Stillmans’ case, specifically the philosophical underpinnings of Stillman’s motives for the abuse to which he subjects his son, Peter. Like many before him, including real historical figures, Stillman believes he can access a prelapsarian (before the fall from the Garden of Eden) language that is common to all humanity by isolating Peter from human interaction and language. These ideas and Stillman’s obsession with language are vital to the development of the theme of The Limits and Ambiguity of Language. Additionally, in Chapter 4, as Quinn summarizes cases of children raised in isolation, the narrator’s tone becomes increasingly instructive, more like a history book than exposition in a piece of fiction. This tone continues in Chapter 6 when Quinn reads and summarizes Stillman’s book, replicating the experience for the novella’s readers and adding another layer of narrative to the story.
These chapters also contribute to the literary techniques of the novella. In keeping with the postmodernist preoccupation with blurring the lines between fact and fiction, real and imaginary, these chapters mix real-world facts with fabricated information. For instance, the examples discussed in Chapter 4 are real: Quinn’s references to the Egyptian pharaoh, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the King of Scotland are true examples of historical language deprivation experiments. Likewise, the literary allusion to Montaigne’s discussion of a natural language is a genuine passage from his essay, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond,” published as Chapter 12 in Book II of his Essays. In Chapter 6, Stillman’s analysis of John Milton’s Paradise Lost is also based on real passages from the text. However, Auster engages in sleight of hand after using these verifiable references, shifting the narrative to discussing the work of Henry Dark. This writer’s text, The New Babel, sounds plausible following the analysis of Milton, yet it is (as Stillman later admits) entirely fabricated for Stillman’s needs and the purposes of the novella.
While Chapter 5 is, in comparison to Chapters 4 and 6, less consequential to the plot, it provides important clues to later developments. Many details in Chapter 5 appear superfluous, offered as mere set dressing for the conflict to come. However, the narrative explicitly warns in Chapter 1 that in a detective novel, “nothing is wasted, no sentence, no word [is] not significant” (8). The narrator makes the point that even if a detail proves insignificant later, it has “the potential to be [significant]” and therefore requires the reader’s attention (8). For instance, Quinn’s conversation with the man at the counter in the diner is meaningless small talk about baseball that contributes little to the plot or the themes of the narrative. Yet, this dialogue is the first time Quinn repeats and mimics Peter’s odd syntax and cliched turns of phrase. Speaking to the man in the diner, Quinn says, “[Y]ou bet your bottom dollar” (38), replicating Peter’s use of the same phrase several times in Chapter 2. Similarly, when Quinn sits down to write notes in his new red notebook, he again repeats Peter’s syntax and phrases, saying: “My name is Paul Auster. That is not my real name” (40), just like Peter. Quinn’s statement that his name is (and is not) Paul Auster is the first major hint that his already-fragmented sense of identity is fracturing further with the addition of a new piece. The more fully he inhabits the role of PI Paul Auster, the more his other identities begin to crack. His new role is literary and textual, built and contingent on his ability to follow the established script of a detective novel. He thus collapses the boundary between reality and fiction, loosening his grip on what is real and what is not.
These chapters also introduce the red notebook, a significant symbol in the narrative that becomes Quinn’s primary means of containing his own identity. Quinn’s dependence on the red notebook adds a new dimension to the theme of Identity as Constructed and Contingent. Previously, the theme arose from the implied relationship between Quinn and his literary identities. Now, he quite literally places his identity in text on paper, and the significance and consequences of this become clear in the final chapter.
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