City of Glass Post II

Language continues to be a constant throughout this novel. During the first few chapters we saw Peter Stillman locked in a room and a hospital for many years. His father hoping that he would learn the language of God, or a unified language. We are now starting to see the affects of this bizarre situation. During Chapter six in particular we see Quinn and Peter talking and Peter is reading chapters and verses from the book of Genisis in the bible. Peter believes that the story of the “Garden of Eden”, and “The Tower of Babel” are both stories of how the unified language of God was disrupted.

Peter talks abut the story of the “Garden of Eden” and how when eve took a bite from the apple it severed all language from God. It is described that Language before that, was interchangeable with the things the names represented. Unity was the best word to describe things before the apple was eaten. With the bite from the apple came “good”, and “evil” with this separation came the separation of language. The same was the case with the “Tower of Babel”. The tower represented unity amongst the people and unity amongst the people with God. With this came the same outcome when the tower fell. The disruption of God’s language came about again.

Auster’s clearly displaying his thoughts about language and what he believes happened to language over time. With all the talk of language and symbols I think we can see that Auster felt very strongly about structuralism.

After reading these chapters Auster’s use of language is clearly to show us that language is supposed to be unified. We are not supposed to have multiple meanings to our language. The use of these bible stories are in my opinion Auster’s attempt at showing us that language was once what it was supposed to be and it is not now.