City of Glass Language

Auster begins to take this novel in an interesting direction through the middle chapters. Auster takes us through this history of language/ colonization lesson as interpreted by Peter Stillman’s father. What, I guess; interested me during chapter 6-9 was the potential development of the importance of language. Obviously, we already know Peter Stillman has an interesting dialect and way of communicating; therefore Auster has already lead on to the fact that communication and language are at least different, if not crucial in understanding this yet to be solved case/ novel. Now after reading this last section, I am very curious to know where Auster is going with lesson on the development of “Gods Language,” language in general, and early colonization.

Obviously there was some significance to reading Stillman’s book and outlining this myriad of information. The question now becomes, what is this information we have now gained used for moving forward? Is it that language will be significant in allowing Quinn/ us the readers to directly solve the problem at hand, or will it help to understand certain characters better, thus allowing us to better understand where we stand in solving the problem?

In comparison with the other works we have studied, City of Glass is quite different thus far, at least in the way the situation has been set up in the first 9 chapters. I mean we still have our protagonist/ detective, the potentially devious women, the problem that needs to be solved etc… The difference lies in how we have reached this point. The fact that the Stillman’s think or say they believe Quinn is Paul Auster, which he is not and he is not a real detective which they believe he is. Also, the meeting with Mr. Stillman was obviously quite bizarre and so too was the interaction between Mrs. Stillman and Quinn so early in the book. Then we now have this interesting introduction of the significance and history of language. Different, but interesting; now I obviously can’t wait to see were Auster is headed.