City of Glass

Chapter 7 introduces the character of Peter Stillman, the father, who is secondary in narrative importance only to Quinn himself. The novella casts Stillman in the role of villain, as Peter and Virginia are convinced that he intends to kill Peter. He is, if nothing else, guilty of child abuse, but Virginia also implies that he might be responsible for his wife’s death. These details are intended to cement Stillman’s antagonist role. However, throughout Chapters 8 and 9, Stillman’s apparent villainy becomes less certain. Quinn views him as “shabby,” “broken down,” and “mad” (56), but most importantly, as harmless. However, when Quinn determines that it is safe to end the case, with Stillman presenting no threat to Peter, Virginia convinces him to continue. Quinn’s telephone call with Virginia in Chapter 8, as with his initial phone call from Peter, is a turning point in the plot. The call, in which Virginia convinces him to continue the case, also inspires him to switch tactics, speaking to Stillman rather than merely following him, which shifts the direction of the plot. Similarly, Quinn’s last call to Virginia to inform her that he lost Stillman marks yet another major turning point.

Chapter 8 focuses on the detailed procedures of tailing a suspect, a conventional element of detective fiction, but the novella subverts this trope. While the exposition describes Stillman’s actions during these long walks, the narrative devotes as much, or even more, exposition to what Quinn does during this time, defying the expectation that the suspect’s actions are of paramount importance. Instead, the novella highlights the importance of the observer, the true center of this narrative, and reveals further hints of Quinn’s loosening grip on his identity and perceptions of reality. 

This is evident in the way Quinn tries to rid himself of his own history to occupy the empty vessel of Paul Auster’s identity. At first, he does so to avoid distraction and keep his attention on Stillman. However, he quickly loses connection with himself, saying that “he [is] no longer Daniel Quinn. He [is] Paul Auster” (61). The primary appeal of this idea to Quinn is the fact that Paul Auster is a “man with no interior, a man with no thoughts” (61), allowing Quinn to avoid, even forget, his own painful past. As before, Quinn actively constructs this PI identity out of detective novels and his own reflections in the red notebook. Moreover, detective novels have led Quinn to believe that he could, with sufficient study, identify the single coherent source of an individual’s behavior—in other words, their inherent soul or identity. Yet, Quinn’s experiences in the novella prove that no such unified or coherent identity exists, underscoring the narrative’s representation of Identity as Constructed and Contingent. Instead, his identity and Stillman’s are an impenetrable collection of fragments, each piece both different from and dependent on the others. Over the course of his investigation of Stillman, Quinn’s various identities clash and crack. As Quinn walks through the New York streets following Stillman, he loses more of himself, widening the cracks between his various identities and becoming increasingly isolated and invisible in the process, highlighting the narrative’s unconventional perspective on Invisibility in a Postmodern City with his acceptance and even desire for that invisibility.

In Chapter 7, the appearance of Stillman’s double also increases the surrealism of the narrative, further collapsing the boundary between reality and fantasy and calling into question which of Quinn’s observations are “true” and which are figments of his imagination. Quinn believes he is not imagining things, and the narrative never explicitly contradicts this claim. This is a common feature of postmodern fiction, which often centers on the failures of rationality to fully explain the random and inexplicable. This failure connects to the novella’s exploration of The Limits and Ambiguity of Language, developing the idea that human language is insufficient to explain or even accurately describe the truly surreal and indefinable aspects of life.

These chapters also offer the narrative’s most concrete and explicit example of doubles, another important motif in the narrative. The second Stillman is not only a double in name but also a double of the actual body and existence of Stillman himself. The second Stillman appears prosperous, while the first is downtrodden, hinting that they represent two possible paths Stillman might have taken in life. In one, he became successful, while in the other, he is broken by his years in the psychiatric hospital. Quinn’s decision to follow the first rather than the second constitutes a value judgment—he assesses the two men and believes that the first Stillman’s visible signs of poverty and degradation mark him as the more dangerous of the two and therefore, more of a threat to Peter.

This choice highlights how decisions made at a turning point often erase the other available options. Quinn’s choice to follow the first Stillman causes the second Stillman to exit the narrative, which is significant for three reasons. First, it highlights the randomness and coincidences in life that defy explanation. Second, it creates a sense of paranoia in the narrative; like the trope of Chekhov’s gun, which argues that a gun seen in the first act must be shot in the final act, the narrative sets up an expectation that the second Stillman will reappear in the final act of the novella, possibly as the real villain. Third, however, the second Stillman’s disappearance then immediately defies this very trope, refusing the logical progression of the detective genre. In a detective novel, such clues would coalesce in the final act revelation of the “culprit,” but City of Glass resists this conclusion. Instead, the second Stillman never reappears, and his existence proves meaningless to the plot.

Of equal importance is the information Quinn gleans from his investigation. Quinn’s three conversations with Stillman in Chapter 9 are of particular significance to Stillman’s characterization and the novella’s themes. Through this dialogue, Stillman reveals the extent of his delusion and grandiose self-importance. Additionally, he proves to be as out of touch with reality as Quinn first supposed, as evidenced by his inane ramblings and his inability to recognize Quinn from meeting to meeting. Moreover, Stillman’s explanation about the inaccuracy of words contributes to the theme of the limits and ambiguity of language. Stillman argues that the connection between a word and its object has been broken, such that language now conceals the truth, “distorting the very thing we are trying to represent” (76). Ironically, Quinn himself suggested the ambiguous nature of language in the first chapter, when he reflects on the colloquialism “private eye,” which contains three layers of meaning: recalling the literal private investigator, the subject “I” of the body, and the eye doing the watching. However, Stillman’s mission to fix the brokenness of representative language only serves to further underscore how divorced from reality he has become.