The Glass Hotel: Chapter 2: I Always Come to You Summary & Analysis

Baltica’s absence suggests to Paul that the band was just being nice when they recommended System Soundbar to him—they hadn’t actually wanted or intended to hang out with him specifically. It’s perhaps Paul’s disillusionment over the band’s interest in him that leads Paul to despair, and he indulges in drugs to quell his pain. Paul’s annoyance at the cabbie’s lecturing suggests that he’s in denial about the degree to which his substance abuse is negatively impacting his life and ability to connect with others. 

This detail about Paul’s mom gives a clearer picture of the extent of Paul’s loneliness and alienation: not only does he lack friends, but he also lacks the support of immediate family. His shallow phone conversation with his father confirms this. It also illustrates the novel’s larger theme of fraud and self-fashioning: even in interactions between immediate family members, people present themselves in a constructed fashion that conceals who they really are. That Paul returns to System Soundbar shows how determined he is to connect with Baltica and make friends. His eagerness also suggests a degree of denial about the band’s disinterest in him.

Paul’s belief that a life with Annika as a romantic partner could fix all his problems is deluded, wishful thinking that ignores the internal work Paul needs to do to recover from his substance abuse problem and become more connected with the world. The flash forward to Paul’s session with his counselor reinforces the ways people narrate their lives and construct a version of reality that makes sense to them.

Paul should sense Annika’s disinterest by her impersonal greeting, but his loneliness makes him desperate and willing to ignore Annika’s signs of rejection. It’s unclear why Paul offers the band the pills that made him sick the other night. He’s either so desperate to ingratiate himself with the band, thereby making himself less lonely, that he’s willing to forget or ignore the fact that the pills are probably bad, or else he’s angry at the band’s rejection of him and wanting to get even. Either way, Paul puts his own needs ahead of others’ when he offers Baltica the pills without disclosing the full truth about their negative side effects. 

It's difficult to believe that Paul really had no reservations about the safety of the pills. His future insistence that he had no way of knowing his negative reaction to them hadn’t been a fluke is his way of rationalizing his irresponsible behavior. This rationalization allows him to live with himself and the major role he played in Charlie’s death. That Paul is discussing this incident many years down the road, however, implies that he harbors unresolved guilt about his actions. 

Paul seems to be fairly out of touch with most of his family. It’s possible that his history with addiction has led to this estrangement, but it also seems like Paul doesn’t make much of an effort to maintain a relationship with them, either—evidenced by the fact that he hasn’t talked to Vincent since her mother died. It’s possible that Paul only reaches out to family when he’s in the midst of a personal crisis, which makes his relationship to them somewhat self-serving: he contacts family when he needs their support, but not when they need his (when Vincent was grieving her dead mother, for instance).  This section also gives some context to the novel’s opening scene: it seems reasonable to assume that the unnamed narrator in the opening section is Vincent, Paul’s half-sister. 

Aunt Shauna’s aloof, guarded tone implies that she’s not close to or comfortable with Paul. The information she reveals about Vincent suggests that Vincent, like Paul, is a troubled character: after all, people who have good relationships and for whom life is going well don’t typically run away from home.

The recurrence of the graffitied words “sweep me up” confirms that Vincent is the opening scene’s unnamed narrator. There’s a myth that the words “sweep me up” were the last words of the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, though this is untrue. Regardless, Vincent’s decision to write these words on her school’s window suggests she feels desperate. Given the context that Vincent is writing these words in the immediate aftermath of her mother’s death, it’s reasonable to surmise that she’s feeling lonely, depressed, and wanting to be “swept up” from, or to escape, the pain and sorrow that plagues her life. 

Vincent’s feelings of emotional alienation in the wake of her mother’s death are supplemented by the physical alienation of the remote, hard-to-reach place she lives. That Vincent’s mother died in the water reinforces water’s symbolic weight: in this instance, it’s water that separated Vincent from her mother and therefore gave her feelings of immense alienation, sorrow, and loneliness.

Paul seems incapable of living up to his responsibilities. The fact that he traveled to Caiette not to honor his emotional obligation to Vincent, but because he had nowhere else to go, shows that his cross-country move wasn’t an act of kindness, but an act of self-serving necessity. Paul’s idea that he can be simultaneously “admirable” and “awful” is a way for him to narrate his life in such a way that he can justify his feelings of guilt at not being there for Vincent: in other words, it’s okay that Paul’s move to Caiette was self-serving since it might have been (at least partially) selfless as well. This kind of thinking is a way for Paul to delude himself into believing he's more selfless than he actually is.

The mention of a hotel is a possible allusion to the titular “glass hotel.” Vincent’s father recognizes the triggering effect water might have on Vincent, given the direct role it played in her mother’s death. His comments also reinforce the geographical features of their home and the negative effects these might have on Vincent: they live on a remote tip of Vancouver Island. As such, they are surrounded completely by water, cut off figuratively and literally from the rest of the world. Such circumstances aren’t going to be positive for Vincent, who is dealing with the fresh grief of her mother’s death and will need all the comfort and connection she can get.

This scene between Vincent and Paul gives the reader some context for the half-siblings’ eventual estrangement: Paul hates Vincent because he blames her very existence for his parents’ divorce. Paul’s hatred of “the idea of Vincent” is misguided and illustrates his tendency to project his own failures and shortcomings onto others. In this instance, Paul is unable to deal with the way his drug addiction has negatively affected his life, so he crafts a narrative in which Vincent and his parents’ divorce is responsible for his own failure to take control of his life.

The divorce fragments and destabilizes Paul’s life, which leads to him feeling rootless and lonely. Being sent away absolves Paul of his responsibility to care for Vincent. In this way, his decision to use drugs—something he surely knows his father won’t approve of—may be seen as a self-serving action.

The zombie-like drug addicts illustrate the depressing, alienating effects of substance abuse. Paul’s paranoia that Melissa will be able to sense what he did to Charlie shows that he’s feeling guilty about his actions. It also suggests that there’s a limit to one’s ability to control the trajectory of one’s life: despite Paul’s efforts to conceal his past, there’s always the chance that his past will catch up to him.

In comparison to Melissa, who goes to great lengths to alter and disguise her outer appearance, Vincent appears more natural and unedited. Perhaps her more natural look suggests that she is honest and upfront about who she is—or perhaps Vincent’s put-together appearance is merely a disguise she puts on to conceal a more troubled interior life. Paul’s reasoning that his past transgressions make him unfit to give Vincent advice absolves him of his responsibility to be a role model. It’s a way for Paul to justify his own inaction and failure to give Vincent advice that might improve her life, which, if her run-down apartment is any indicator, is in dire need of improvement. 

Paul’s goal to be a better person shows how dissatisfied he is with the way his life has panned out, but his decision to put off doing anything about it until after the new year might also imply that he believes that change is beyond him. Vincent’s solo dancing reveals to Paul and Melissa the sad, lonely existence that Vincent hides beneath her put-together exterior.

That Paul sees Charlie’s ghost is further evidence of his guilt. Paul’s confession to Melissa and Vincent also implies that he’s feeling guilty and wants to get this guilt off his chest. Despite the protestations of ignorance Paul undergoes in his future therapy sessions, it’s clear that, deep down, Paul knows he is responsible for what happened to Charlie, and that the claims he makes about not knowing the pills were bad are only a defense mechanism he employs in an attempt to rid himself of this guilt.  In this latest flash-forward to Paul’s future therapy sessions, the novel outlines a dichotomy between being absolved of guilt in a legal, external sense and being absolved of guilt internally; despite the fact that Paul knew (correctly) that he’d get away with what he did to Charlie, he still feels internally guilty for what he did and for the fact that he was never forced to face the consequences.

Hearing the Baltica song at the club reinvigorates Paul’s feelings of guilt. The song is itself a ghostly presence, reminding Paul of his past transgressions and the lack of consequences he faced for them. Since “Y2K” didn’t destroy the planet (many feared that the Y2K bug—a computer programming flaw affecting dates beyond 1999—would wreak global havoc), Paul will have to try to be a better person if he wants to make good on the promise he made to himself, though it remains to be seen if he’ll follow through on this ambitious new year’s resolution.

The start of a new year fills Paul with a false, misguided sense of hope. Just as Paul thought that a relationship with Annika might help him turn his life around, he seems to believe that the structure of a new year will give him the strength he needs to become a better person. In reality, neither of these things will make a difference if Paul fails to search within himself for the will to change. That Paul continues to see Charlie’s ghost for years to come reflects the pervasive, long-lasting impact of the guilt he feels over giving Charlie bad drugs. It shows that, despite the lies Paul tells himself, he knows that he’s responsible for knowingly giving Charlie bad pills.