Quinn’s odyssey
...oped for: “was it merely some sort of note to himself […] was it intended as a message to others? At the very least, Quinn concluded, it meant that Stillman had not forgotten Henry Dark.” (NYT p.71) And in all this madness he is given a refuge “Quinn realized that he needed something more to keep himself occupied […] In the end, it was the red notebook that offered him salvation” (NYT p.62), and not only, as the red notebook will end up being the proof of his existence. Stillman junior and senior seem nothing more than pawns in a greater plot created by the author. Their message to Quinn: junior’s monologue and senior’s letters lead him into riddles upon riddles, with no definite answer. We never find out if the last two letters contoured by Stillman’s path were actually EL, which “he [Quinn] told himself was the ancient Hebrew for God”. So here we are left without God, a story with no absolute truth. Both Peter Stillman junior and senior disappear from the story before it ends, strengthening an image of disarray in Quinn’s mind. Intrigue and climax, junior and senior, those two become the Yin and Yang of the narrative. Now that we took away the pawns let’s look for the bishop which most likely identifies with Quinn’s spirit: always moving in diagonals, never finding the shortest way from point A to B. What makes him so interesting? His names, aliases call them what you will, I call them personalities. Each name relates to a part of his ego: Quinn – the guy retreating towards a hermetic life, a person with a pattern to his existence “…he wrote mystery novels […] and he produced them at the rate of about one a year”(NYT p.3); William Wilson – the writer, the mask that the outside world never got to see “No book by William Wilson never included an author’s photograph or biographical note.”(NYT p.4); Max Work – his ideal, the excitement of life, the joy and adrenaline of his imagination “He had, of course, long ago stopped...