How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
I found my way to the tropical greenhouse. It was another world inside, wet and warm, like the breath of people making love had been trapped there. With my finger I wrote on the glass LEO GURSKY. (1.87)
As Leo tells us elsewhere, "It had been a long time since I'd been with a woman" (7.63). Here, by writing his name onto a scene he's associated with sex and romance, he's trying to identify himself with that sort of human connection.
Quote #5
Afterwards, I found myself standing in line, my hands shaking as I pressed into his the scrap of paper on which I'd written my name. He glanced at it and copied it into a book. [...] "TO LEON GURSKY," it said (1.95-96).
This one's brutal: it's the one time Leo meets his son face-to-face. He actually hands him a piece of paper with his name on it, but Isaac misreads it and writes down the wrong name! Nothing could better symbolize what a stranger Leo is to him.
Quote #6
But my brother refused to answer to it. When people asked him his name, he made something up. He went through fifteen or twenty names. For a month he referred to himself in the third person as Mr. Fruit. On his sixth birthday he took a running leap out of a second-floor window and tried to fly. He broke his arm and got a scar on his forehead, but from then on nobody ever called him anything but Bird. (2.1)
This seems to be a pretty clear search for identity. What's special about the name he eventually settles on? Does it make sense that Bird is finally named after something he has done, rather than being named after a bunch of dead guys?