City of Glass runs on five characters and one repeated surname. Daniel Quinn is a crime writer who takes a case under another man's name. Peter Stillman the son is his client, Peter Stillman the father his target, and Virginia Stillman makes the arrangements. A writer called Paul Auster appears as a character, not as the book's author.
The cast
City of Glass runs on five people and one repeated surname. Daniel Quinn is the man the book follows, and by the end of the first chapter he has agreed to become someone else. Two characters share the name Stillman, father and son, and the gap between them carries most of the plot. Virginia Stillman arranges the case and later closes it off. A writer named Paul Auster appears inside the novel as a character, not as the book's author, and that distinction is worth settling first, since it is the mistake most readers arrive with. A sixth figure speaks only in the final two pages and stays unnamed throughout, with a page of his own rather than a paragraph here.
Daniel Quinn
Quinn is thirty-five, lives alone in Manhattan, and writes detective novels for a living. His wife and son are dead before the book opens, a fact it states once and does not return to. He publishes under the name William Wilson, borrowed from Poe, and the detective in his books is called Max Work. When a telephone call after midnight asks for the Auster Detective Agency, Quinn corrects the caller twice, then on the third night says he is Paul Auster and takes the case.
Wilson, Work and Auster are not disguises Quinn can set down. Wilson is the name he publishes under, Work is the figure he thinks through when he writes, and Auster is the name he answers to once the case starts. The novel gives him three working identities to see what is left of "Quinn" once he has occupied all of them. By the closing chapters he cannot get back to the first one, and the surveillance becomes watching with no subject and, at the end, no one to report it.
Peter Stillman, the son
Peter Stillman is the case Quinn is hired to run. As a child, his father shut him in a darkened room for nine years and would not speak to him, testing whether a child raised outside language would produce the speech Adam used in Eden. A fire in the building brought the police in, and the father's arrest followed. Stillman spent the next thirteen years in an institution.
By the time Quinn meets him, Stillman speaks in short broken sentences and introduces himself this way:
He is the reason Quinn is hired at all, and the clearest evidence in the book that his father's theory produced damage rather than a recovered language.
Peter Stillman, the father
Released after thirteen years, Stillman senior arrives in New York and walks Manhattan for hours, picking up broken umbrellas and other discarded objects. Quinn follows him and records the routes in a red notebook, and the shapes of the walks appear to spell out words across the pages, though the book never confirms what they say. Stillman still works on the theory that cost him his son: a language in which a word and the thing it names would again be one and the same, undoing the confusion God imposed at Babel.
Quinn loses him partway through the surveillance, and the last word on Stillman senior arrives secondhand: Auster, the character, telephones Quinn to say Stillman has died—a fall from the Brooklyn Bridge—with no explanation given beyond that. The father's case never resolves. It stops being followed.
Virginia Stillman
Virginia was Peter's speech therapist at the institution and married him to get him out of it. She is now his wife and his guardian, and she is the one who hires Quinn, briefs him on the case, and pays him. She stays the fixed point Quinn reports to as the surveillance runs on. Later, once Quinn has given up his own apartment to keep watch on the Stillmans' building, she has the locks changed on him, cutting off the room he had been using and the last practical reason he had to stay on the case.
Paul Auster, the character
A writer named Paul Auster appears inside the novel, married, with a young son, at work on an essay about who actually wrote Don Quixote. Quinn goes looking for him once the Stillman case runs out of road, expecting a detective and finding a novelist who has never heard of the Auster Detective Agency. He is not the author of City of Glass. That confusion is the single most common misreading of the book, and the novel sets it up on purpose so it can be caught. He lends Quinn money partway through and offers no real help beyond that. He is a device built into the plot, not a stand-in for the man who wrote the sentences.
The narrator
An unnamed voice enters the book only in its last two pages, identifying himself as a friend of the character Paul Auster. He says Auster passed him Quinn's red notebook once the case was over and that the account is built from what the notebook held. He is neither Quinn nor the character called Auster. His role, and what he does and does not know about what became of Quinn, is covered in full on the ending-explained page.
For the plot in order, see the chapter guide. The doubling between the two Stillmans, and between Quinn and the names he takes on, is followed further on the themes and symbols page, and the red notebook itself is tracked across Auster's other books on the recurring motifs page.