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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Glass Hotel, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Complicity and Interconnectedness
Guilt and Responsibility
Fraud and Constructed Identity
Greed, Delusion, and Self Interest
Alienation and Self-Knowledge
Regret and Disillusionment
Summary
Analysis
In a series of connected fragments of speech, an unnamed narrator “begin[s] at the end,” telling of falling off a ship into a stormy, violent sea, their camera escaping from their hands. Next, the narrator remembers the words “sweep me up,” which they wrote on a window when they were 13. In another fragment, the narrator laments the coldness of the sea. Next, the narrator recalls standing by the shore in Caiette when they were 13, holding their new camera and filming the waves that lapped onto the shore. As the narrator filmed the waves, they repeated the phrase, “I want to go home.”
The narrative’s fragmented, non-linear quality establishes one of the novel’s main themes—that a person’s story and identity are constructed, assembled things. Given water’s tendency to symbolize alienation and independence, the fact that this unnamed narrator is falling into the sea suggests that they’re in a lonely, searching place in their life. The narrator’s wish “to go home” supports this idea. Perhaps they are also dealing with unresolved issues from earlier in life, which is supported by their repeated reference to events that occurred when they were 13. It’s a cliché that a person’s life flashes before their eyes before they die, so the presence of these memories (and the fact that the narrator is plummeting into a stormy, violent sea) suggests that the narrator is near death.
Themes
The narrator wonders where they are, noting that they no longer feel cold. They recall the third mate greeting them as they boarded the Neptune Cumberland for the first time. The narrator expresses a desire to see their brother, Paul, with whom things are complicated, and whom they haven’t seen in a decade. The narrator focuses hard and sees Paul slumped over in a doorway in a foreign city. It’s unclear whether the narrator’s brother sees them, too.
The fact that the narrator no longer feels cold implies that they have died. The fact that the narrator hasn’t seen their brother, Paul, in a decade suggests that they have unresolved issues or grievances with him. When the presumably dead narrator wills to see Paul, it seems as though they are making Paul see their ghost.
Themes
