We will never know the agonies he suffered at having to leave his spot...

"We will never know the agonies he suffered at having to leave his spot" (Auster 116). Near the end of the first book in the trilogy, Quinn is out of money. He suspects there is a check waiting for him in his p.o. box but to go check it he'll have to leave the post from which he has been observing Stillman for weeks. He struggles with the decision and eventually decides to leave. Lacking money for a bus ticket, he walks. Weak, confused, and honestly somewhat crazed, he makes his way to the post office very slowly. He sees a mirror, "and for the first time since he had begun his vigil, Quinn saw himself... he did not recognize the person he saw there as himself... He had turned into a bum" (117). Quinn's entire existence to this point has been based around figuring out the Stillman case, and now he's broke and failing. Stillman is still a mystery and the entire thing is seeming less like an adventure and increasingly like a poor decision on his part. But as Quinn has very little, he keeps at it. Honestly it's weird that more mystery novels don't end up like this. Most of them just have small dips followed by major breakthroughs. This novel starts off in a relatively depressing way and then really only gets worse, since even the breakthroughs Quinn makes are confusing and lead to very little. This can be seen as well when Quinn meets the real Auster. Quinn goes into the hotel where Stillman has been staying and has a short discussion in which he establishes that Stillman has left the premises. The man he's talking to is Paul Auster the character, allegedly a detective. However Quinn asks about this and Auster insists that he's actually a writer. Quinn explains his story to Auster hoping that he can help, but instead Auster just offers to cash the check for Quinn since the check is in Auster's name. For the life of me I can't remember what page that's from but it definitely happened. The whole book is like that.

Word Count: 348