City of Glass

Peter Stillman, the father, is the deuteragonist of City of Glass. Stillman is in his sixties, with white hair and pale eyes. He was formerly a professor of religion and philosophy at Columbia University, where he wrote about “theological interpretations of the New World” (26). He wrote a book titled The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World, in which he analyzes the work of John Milton and Henry Dark. However, as he later reveals to Quinn, Stillman concocted Henry Dark to make controversial claims without fear of repercussion from his academic peers. This revelation reveals the character’s moral ambiguity, which is further explored through his fixation on discovering the original language of man, through which he believed he could return humanity to a state of innocence.

His moral ambiguity and status as a quasi-antagonist are further exemplified by his treatment of his son, Peter. Stillman locked his two-year-old son in isolation, occasionally beating him, an experiment that he hoped would confirm his belief that without contact with language, his son would spontaneously acquire the “original” language, signaling a return to the innocence of humans before Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden. When this abuse was discovered, Stillman was placed in a psychiatric hospital for 13 years. After his release, he spends weeks living in a motel and wandering the streets of New York, giving names to the trash he picks up. His activities, followed by Quinn, reveal that his earlier fixations remain the same: He claims that he is inventing a new language that will more accurately represent the reality of objects. 

Stillman’s behavior is odd and unpredictable, while his attitude is self-important and grandiose. He has a firm belief in his own genius and importance, and he remains a static character, unchanged by his abuse of Peter or his time in the psychiatric hospital. After three encounters with Quinn, he checks out of his motel and disappears, dying by suicide when he jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge months later. Through Stillman’s dialogue, the narrative introduces and develops thematic elements about the fractured nature of the city and The Limits and Ambiguity of Language.

Peter Stillman, the son, is the catalyst of the plot. Beyond that, however, he is a minor, static character. Peter is a young man, approximately 25 years old, with pale skin, white-blond hair, and watery blue eyes, looks that mirror his father’s. He walks with slow, awkward, mechanical movements. He speaks in a strange, rambling, childlike way, often repeating the same words and phrases. Although Quinn is at first surprised by Peter’s unconventional behavior, the narrative reveals that his condition was caused by his father, who locked him in a dark room with no human contact for nine years, after which he was discovered and placed in a hospital. At the hospital, he learned rudimentary speech and behavior. Two years prior, his speech therapist, Virginia, married him so that he could leave the hospital safely and have a semblance of a normal life. He claims that he learned to speak the language of God, as his father hoped he would. He now fears that his father is coming to kill him.

Peter’s function in the novella is to provide the inciting incident of the plot through his phone call to Quinn, meant for Paul Auster. However, beyond the initial contact, he has little direct impact on Quinn’s actions. He only appears once in the entire novella, in conversation with Quinn in Chapter 2. His plight provides Quinn with motivation, after which he is no longer important to the action or the outcome. 

Peter is one example of the doubling that occurs in the novella, as he and his father have the same name, Peter Stillman, and Quinn’s son was also named Peter. Additionally, Peter’s rambling speech in Chapter 2 includes several phrases that repeat both in his dialogue and later, providing important examples of repetition throughout the novella, developing the narrative’s themes regarding language and meaning from a different angle.

Virginia Stillman, Peter’s wife, is a secondary character with more importance to the plot than Peter himself. Quinn estimates her to be 30-35 years old, with dark hair and dark eyes, a sensuous figure, and a “vaguely seductive” expression (13). She was Peter’s speech therapist and married him to become his legal guardian and give him a life outside the hospital. She acknowledges that there is no romance between the married couple, and she reinforces this fact by kissing Quinn during the meeting at the apartment. Quinn is attracted to her and begins obsessively imagining a relationship with her. However, their later conversations over the phone are professional, to his disappointment.

Virginia is the character that Quinn reports to during his investigation of Stillman, rather than Peter. She provides all the concrete information that Quinn has about Peter and his father, the circumstances of the case, and Stillman’s arrival at the train station, making her the arbiter of their personal history and shaping Quinn’s understanding of the case. She is therefore crucial to advancing the plot after Peter’s initial phone call. As the case progresses, she insists that Quinn keep following Stillman, even when he believes it is time to quit, and it is Quinn’s inability to contact her later that sets off his final mental decline. 

Virginia is an ambiguous, static character: Although Quinn briefly suspects that she is conspiring with Stillman, her motives and intentions remain unclear. Like Quinn, the reader is similarly uninformed as to her motivations; the novella offers no clues as to her actions either way. Due to her appearance and Quinn’s attraction, Virginia contributes to the novella’s exploration of the classic pulp detective novel, fulfilling the trope of the femme fatale. This adherence to the trope is furthered by her ambiguous motivations, but her character also subverts that trope by never actually trying to seduce the protagonist, nor being overtly involved in Stillman’s plot.