The Way of Shadows, by Brent Weeks, opened up by describing the setting. The setting is a tavern built over marshland in the ghetto side of a town called Warrens. The tavern is floored with baboon poles and raised on stilts. You can tell it’s very small, dark, and nasty since the narrator describes it as “the crawl space was too small for most people to go after them. The guilds bigs were too big and the littles were too scared to squeeze into the suffocating darkness shared with spiders and cockroaches and rats and the wicked half-wild tomcat the owner set” (Weeks 1). 

From the first page and a quarter, we can infer the town or area of town, is divided by two. The bigs and the littles lead by a man named Rat. I’m personally assuming it’s referring to age but it might also be about social class.  The idea of social class comes from when the novel is talking about the leader Rat whom is said to, “Rat was collecting guild dues tomorrow… Rat wasn’t understanding and he didn’t know his own strength. Littles had died from his beatings,” (Weeks 2). 

The main plot, so far, is that it’s a medieval association containing craftsmans that maintains considerable power. The theme is leading to the fact that people whom are desperate would do anything for money or not to become overcame by fear. Azoth, whom is crawling through this tavern, is digging desperately for coins to turn in. Rat, whom is appearing to be the leader, is demanding these coins and would beat younger children if they did contribute. The economy in this society seems to be very poor and scraping for anything. 

After the opening, the chapter continues talking about how Azoth is traveling through this tavern to collect coins. You can refer he’s not too healthy or well kept because he is trying to hurry since it’s cold and rainy and he distrusts that he’ll survive if he catches a cold. Azoth self doubts himself a lot even though he’s extremely observant and can do better than what he assumes he could do. I feel as if fear is holding him down, because he almost got killed by a spider, in fear of getting killed by a assassin. 

In this particular scene, which is showing how he’s observant and fearful, he hears two men. One of them he describes as “something kind and lonely in this lanky figure. He was perhaps thirty with a scraggly blond beard and a huge sword on his hip” (Weeks 3). And Durzo Blint, a cruel wetboy (which is a lower type of assasssin) who was well feared and considered a demon by the community. As the two men are talking about Durzos drinking that night, Azoth is feeling a spider on himself but doubts himself saying it was his imagination. But it wasn’t, so as he was trying to get it off him, the two men noticed him…