“It was strange for Patrick to realize later that he had learned important things [from his father], the way children learn from watching how adults angle a hat or approach a strange dog. […] But he absorbed everything from a distance. The only moments his father was verbal was when calling square dances in the Yawker and Tamworth hotels during the log drives.” 

At the end of Chapter 1, which contains Patrick’s recollections of his childhood (narrated in the third person), Patrick reflects on the way his father’s personality imprinted upon his own personality as an adult. Later in the novel, Patrick’s lack of verbal fluency is strongly emphasized as a defining feature of his character. This reflection on his father’s taciturn nature explains how Patrick became a man who makes his mark on the world through action, not language.

“She [the nun] leaned forward earnestly and looked at him [Nicholas], searching out his face now. Words just on the far side of her skin, about to fall out. Wanting to know his name which he had forgotten to tell her.” 

Throughout the traumatic episode in which Nicholas rescues the nun (Alice) in midair after she was blown off the bridge, Alice does not utter a word. This moment, in which Alice wishes to break her silence and connect with Nicholas but ultimately cannot, encapsulates several of the novel’s important themes and motifs: verbal versus nonverbal communication, skin as a barrier around identity or an obstacle to human connection, and the humanizing power of names. Throughout the novel, Alice becomes increasingly verbal, extroverted, embodied, and confident, but this first scene with Nicholas offers a striking portrait of her initial timidity.

“North America is still without language, gestures and work and bloodlines are the only currency.” 

This quotation from the chapter about Nicholas and the Bloor Street Viaduct provides a pithy summary of one of the novel’s most important themes: Language gives people the opportunity to individuate, and without it they are reducible to demographics like ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and occupation.