The Westing Game

“There’s only one apartment left, but you’ll love it. It was meant for you.”

Barney Northrup says this to Grace Wexler as she tours the apartment with Jake. It sounds like a phrase any salesman might use to close a deal, but as readers find out later, Westing has quite literally planned for each heir to inhabit a specific apartment within the building to engineer a specific set of circumstances.

“Sydelle Pulaski looked up and saw only the dim, warped reflections of treetops and drifting clouds in the glass face of Sunset Towers.”

As Barney Northrup gives Sydelle a tour of the building she’s about to move into, she notices parts of the building’s appearance that have larger metaphorical meaning in the novel. In particular, the “warped reflections” suggest the tension between appearance and reality, thus introducing the theme of Appearances as a (Non)indication of the Self.

“They say his body is sprawled out on a fancy Oriental rug, and his flesh is rotting off those mean bones, and maggots are creeping in his eye sockets and crawling out of his nose holes.”

When the adolescents gather outside in the parking lot with Otis and Sandy, Sandy begins creating a mythology around Westing. This effectively propels Turtle to take the dare to enter the house, setting in motion the conditions necessary for the heirs to believe that Westing has died and left behind a fortune. Sandy (one of Westing’s personas) understands that the children have no personal history with Westing and uses this as a strategy to fill them with a sense of curiosity and wonder.