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Chapter 1: Vincent in the Ocean
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
It’s the end of 1999, and 23-year-old Paul is studying finance at the University of Toronto. He wanted to study musical composition, but he sold his keyboard some years ago and, after many stints in rehab, his mother was unwilling to finance “an impractical degree.” Paul is unhappy with his life, uninterested in finance, and feels out of place after rehab. He hasn’t even been able to have much of a social life, as he’s so busy with work, school, and trying not to use drugs. Paul did badly in his midterms and, as a result, spends a lot of time in the library, or alone in his extremely small room. He tries to focus on his studies but is distracted by a theoretical, simple piano composition he’d like to write.
Paul’s troubled past makes him feel socially alienated from his comparatively young, carefree peers. Beyond this, Paul’s lifestyle—he lives alone, and he’s trying desperately not to fail out of college—physically alienates him as well. Paul’s dissatisfaction with his life seems to stem from the fact that he regrets the time he lost to his drug addiction, which could have been better put toward creative, musical pursuits and toward forming connections with others.
Themes
In early December, Paul hears about a local band named Baltica. He does some research and finds the club at which Baltica is slated to perform late that night and decides to attend. Baltica turns out to be a trio made up of a guy on bass, a guy controlling electronics via a keyboard, and a girl playing an electric violin. The electronic music is jarring to Paul, who much prefers Beethoven. The violin player is strikingly beautiful, though, so Paul doesn’t mind. Suddenly, the girl sings into the microphone “I always come to you,” and the electronics create an echo effect, sustaining her words. The girl begins to play her violin and suddenly the music makes total sense to Paul, though this disappears as soon as she stops playing.
The girl’s violin music appeals to Paul because it is reminiscent of the classical music toward which he normally gravitates. That Paul responds so intensely to the lyrics “I always come to you” is indicative of his social and literal alienation: he’s lonely, and he wants somebody to “come to [him],” to make him feel less alone. It also frames the act of coming together as central to the human experience: people are always looking for connection and sympathy from others.
Themes
After their performance, Paul compliments the band, though he’s mostly interested in the violinist. The bassist introduces himself as Theo before introducing Paul to Charlie, the keyboardist, and Annika, the violinist. Paul explains that he’s new to Toronto and asks the group for places with good music to go dancing. Theo recommends System Soundbar, noting that Tuesday is the best night to go.
That Paul approaches the band after the performance is further evidence of his loneliness. Still, the special attention Paul pays to Annika implies that he’s less interested in complimenting the band than he is in pursuing Annika romantically, which makes Paul’s actions rather self-serving.
Themes
The Tuesday after exams (which Paul barely passes) he heads to System Soundbar; to his disappointment, Baltica is nowhere in sight. He buys a bag of blue ecstasy pills from a girl at the club. He takes half a pill and immediately feels like he’s going to die. Paul takes a cab back to campus and is annoyed at the cabbie, who lectures Paul about alcoholism.
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.
Themes
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Two weeks later, Paul is on campus, even though it’s winter break, as his mom’s therapist advised her to keep some distance from her son. Paul has a lonely Christmas day, which includes an awkward, superficial phone call with his father. On a Tuesday night between Christmas and New Year’s, he walks to System Soundbar. When he gets there, he realizes he’s wearing the same shirt he wore the last time he was there and that the bag of blue pills is still in his pocket.
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.
Themes
Paul finds Baltica at the club. Annika looks beautiful, and in her Paul sees a new, alternate reality—one that transcends his current, failed college experience. The narrative flashes forward 20 years into the future; Paul talks to his counselor, explaining that he did what he did that night because Annika was his “ticket out of” his world.
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.
Themes
Back in the present, Paul approaches the band. Annika greets him, though rather impersonally. Paul asks out Annika, who immediately turns him down. He notices Theo watching him and realizes that he’s imposing on the band. In response, Paul offers them some of the bad ecstasy pills, explaining that it’s not really his thing and he doesn’t want them to go to waste. Annika says she tried the same pills last week.
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.
Themes
The narrative flashes forward to Paul talking to his counselor, insisting that he didn’t know the pills were bad—that he thought his negative reaction to them was just a fluke. He argues that he really believed Annika had tried the same pills as him, and that they were fine. The narrative switches back to the present. Annika takes one of the pills before giving two to Charlie, whose heart stops shortly after.
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.
Themes
It’s New Year’s Eve. The Y2K hysteria dictates that the world will collapse at midnight of January 1, 2000, and Paul’s world feels on the verge of collapse, too. In the past 72 hours, he’s barely been able to function. Now Paul is trying to call his half-sister, Vincent, at a pay phone at the Vancouver airport. After fleeing Toronto in the aftermath of Charlie’s death, he doesn’t have much cash left, and his new plan is to stay with his aunt Shauna, who has a huge house. Paul hasn’t seen Vincent in five years, when she was 13 and he was 18, right after Vincent’s mother died. Shauna was appointed Vincent’s legal guardian after her mother’s death.
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.
Themes
Aunt Shauna finally picks up, addressing Paul cautiously. She tells him that Vincent moved out about a year ago to live in the city with a friend from Caiette, and that they parted on strained terms. Paul wonders what kind of apartment Vincent is living in, and who she’s living with. He recalls Vincent’s friend Melissa, who was present when Vincent was suspended for graffitiing a building.
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.
Themes
The narrative flashes back to the graffiti incident. Vincent has just sprayed the words “Sweep me up” on one of her school’s windows in the town of Port Hardy, located at the very tip of Vancouver Island. Paul sees Vincent do it, and he, Vincent, and Melissa stand silent in the aftermath of Vincent’s actions. Vincent explains that she just liked the phrase. Paul tries to convince them all to hurry to catch the school bus back to Grace Harbour, and Vincent reluctantly agrees.
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.
Themes
The three ride back to Grace Harbour where a mail boat picks them up to take them back to Caiette, which is so unpopulated and remote that it makes Port Hardy look like a bustling city in comparison. The mail boat docks in Caiette, and Vincent and Paul return home, where Dad and Grandma are waiting for them. Grandma normally lives in Victoria and Paul in Toronto, but they moved here after Vincent’s mother disappeared two weeks ago, her canoe abandoned in the water.
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.
Themes
Dad confronts Vincent about the graffiti. He tells her she’s been suspended for a week. Vincent silently goes to her room. Paul feels that he disappointed the grownups in his failure to look out for Vincent. His family out here seems to be under the impression that Paul “made a noble sacrifice” in moving to Caiette, but in reality, he’d been kicked out of school and his mother’s house. Paul entertains the notion that a person can be “admirable” and “awful” at the same time.
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.
Themes
Dad says he can’t take Vincent to work with him and entertains the idea of sending Vincent to live with his sister Shauna. Grandma asks if there are any nearer jobs Dad can take, which would enable him to keep Vincent here, but he says there are none. Even the new hotel isn’t an option, as it’ll be under construction for another year, and he doesn’t know anything about construction. Beyond this, he’s not sure that being around so much water is good for Vincent.
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.
Themes
Paul goes upstairs to check on Vincent in her disheveled, old room. Vincent confronts Paul about being too old to be in year eleven of school, and he admits that he fell behind after being in rehab last year. Vincent asks Paul if he did drugs because his parents split up and then accuses him of smoking weed in his bedroom. Inwardly, Paul expresses a hatred not toward Vincent, but toward “the idea of Vincent,” as she is the product of his father’s impulsive love affair with Vincent’s mother, the much younger “hippie poet” who broke up his parents’ marriage.
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.
Themes
After the marriage broke up, Paul and his mother left Caiette for the Toronto suburbs, and Paul would return to British Columbia for summers and Christmases, shuffled between two households while Vincent got to live with both parents all the time. Paul leaves Vincent to go and smoke weed in his room, but Dad catches him, and he’s shipped back to Toronto later that week.
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.
Themes
The narrative returns to New Year’s Eve, 1999, which is the next time Paul sees Vincent, when he takes a bus downtown from the airport, Bach blasting through his headphones. Vincent’s apartment is in a very rundown neighborhood, the streets of which are populated by zombie-like drug addicts. Paul knocks on the door, and Melissa answers. When Paul sees her, he imagines that she can see on his skin the truth of what he did to Charlie Wu. Paul can see from Melissa’s style that she’s really into the rave scene: she wears blue, faux fur pants, a rainbow sweatshirt, and her hair is dyed bright pink.
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.
Themes
Melissa leads Paul downstairs, into the dilapidated basement apartment. Vincent is there, making coffee in the kitchen. Her hair is its natural shade of brown, no longer blue like it was the last time Paul saw her. She looks put-together, and Paul has to remind himself that he doesn’t hate her. The three sit around the living room and drink their instant coffee. Vincent fills Paul in on her past, explaining how she dropped out of high school. Paul isn’t sure if he should try to convince Vincent to go back to school or mind his own business; after all, given what he did to Charlie, he’s certainly no role model.
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.
Themes
The three decide to go out dancing. Paul resolves to be a better person if the world survives Y2K. He and Melissa head to the bar to order drinks and the strikingly beautiful Vincent begins to dance alone, “lost in her own world,” as Vincent’s mother used to describe it. Melissa and Paul silently consider “the Tragedy of Vincent.”
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.
Themes
Later on, they join Vincent on the dance floor. Paul thinks he sees Charlie Wu in the crowd and becomes paralyzed with fear before realizing it’s only a random kid. Still, the hallucination stuns him, and he stumbles into the cold streets to get some air. Later, at a diner, Melissa asks why Paul came here for New Year’s, since the bars are probably better in Toronto. Paul explains that he’s moving here, which prompts Melissa to ask if he’s in trouble. He tells them about the bad E. The narrative flashes forward to a conversation between Paul and his counselor in Utah in 2019, in which he admits knowing he would get away with Charlie’s death.
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.
Themes
In a basement club later that night, Paul recognizes the music and lyrics: “I always come to you, come to you, come to you—” which spins him into a panic attack: it’s a club mix of the Baltica song. As they enter the club and begin to dance, Paul is overcome with the sense that he's being watched, and he again thinks he sees Charlie Wu out of the corner of his eye. He tries to shrug it off and dance. Y2K doesn’t destroy the planet, and it’s suddenly 2000.
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.
Themes
At the end of the night, they return to Melissa’s old car and congratulate themselves on surviving. Vincent curls up to sleep in the back, and Melissa, red-eyed, drives too fast and chats too easily. Paul is overtaken by a sense of hope at the possibilities this new century could afford him. If he could make it through seeing Charlie’s ghost, he figures, he can make it through anything. The chapter ends with a flash forward to Paul speaking with his counselor, in which Paul reveals that this was only the first time he saw Charlie’s ghost.
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.
Themes
