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En la novela City of Glass, cuando el autor ficcionalizado “Paul Auster” presenta su teoría de Don Quixote, él propone una exploración irónica de la estructura narrativa de la novela. Si bien es cierta esta caracterización, este ensayo plantea que al traer el contenido metaficcional de la novela al primero plano, la teoría de “Auster” desplaza el enfoque de la novela del cuento detective que hasta este punto ha sido su enfoque a la interrogación del lenguaje. Utilizando la distinción entre locura y poesía que Michel Foucault desarrolla en su lectura de Don Quixote, este ensayo propone que Daniel Quinn asume la búsqueda de Don Quixote en su deseo de encontrar un signo lingüístico unificado en que la palabra escrita articula la coherencia del mundo, lo que Foucault nombra su “deeper meaning.”
DANIEL QUINN AS "HERO OF THE SAME" Peter Stillman Sr.'s theory of prelapsarian language has several points of contact with Foucault's understanding of the chivalric milieu that Don Quixote believes to "give form to Law" (n8). Seeking to enact a world in which "nature and books alike [are] parts of a single text," Don Quixote instead confronts a world in which language and things have "dissolved their former alliance" and "[words] are no longer the mark of things" (119). Given the dissolution of a conformity between words and things, between the chivalric tale he takes as Law and the contemporary world in which he moves, Don Quixote's role as knight errant demands both that he is true to the words and actions of the knights whose adventures he reads and that he prove the truth of these precursor texts: "If he is to resemble the texts of which he is the witness, the representation, the real analogue, Don Quixote must also furnish proof and provide the indubitable sign that they are telling the truth, that they really are the language of the world" (118). The narrator explains about Quinn's pleasure as a reader of detective fiction: "The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked.
