Previous
Melissa
Walter serves as the Hotel Caiette’s night manager in the 2000s. He later becomes the caretaker when the resort is abandoned in the aftermath of the collapse of Jonathan Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme. Walter first comes to the hotel from Toronto after he’s hired by Raphael, the manager, to be the night manager. During his time at the hotel, Walter becomes acquainted with Alkaitis, who convinces him to invest in his fund. Walter loses everything when Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme collapses, and he has a hard time trusting another person after suffering such a betrayal. However, living alone in the abandoned, isolated Hotel Caiette—a place he has loved since he first set foot in it—gives Walter a solitary peace. Walter is the manager on duty the night Paul vandalizes the lobby’s glass wall. He immediately recognizes Paul as guilty and fires him.
Walter Quotes in The Glass Hotel
The The Glass Hotel quotes below are all either spoken by Walter or refer to Walter. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3: The Hotel
Quotes
“Very few people who go to the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness. Almost no one.” Raphael leaned back in his chair with a little smile, presumably hoping that Walter might ask what he meant, but Walter waited him out. “At least, not the people who stay in five-star hotels,” Raphael said. “Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent. The point here—” he touched the white star with one finger, and Walter admired his manicure—“is extraordinary luxury in an unexpected setting. There’s an element of surrealism to it, frankly. It’s a five-star experience in a place where your cell phone doesn’t work.”
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Alkaitis was interesting only in retrospect. He’d come to the Hotel Caiette with his wife, now deceased. He and his wife had fallen in love with the place, so when it’d come up for sale he’d bought the property, which he leased to the hotel’s management company. He lived in New York City and came to the hotel three or four times a year. He carried himself with the tedious confidence of all people with money, that breezy assumption that no serious harm could come to him. He was generically well dressed, tanned in the manner of people who spend time in tropical settings in the wintertime, reasonably but not spectacularly fit, unremarkable in every way. Nothing about him, in other words, suggested that he would die in prison.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Glass Hotel LitChart as a printable PDF.
Walter Quotes in The Glass Hotel
The The Glass Hotel quotes below are all either spoken by Walter or refer to Walter. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3: The Hotel
Quotes
“Very few people who go to the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness. Almost no one.” Raphael leaned back in his chair with a little smile, presumably hoping that Walter might ask what he meant, but Walter waited him out. “At least, not the people who stay in five-star hotels,” Raphael said. “Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent. The point here—” he touched the white star with one finger, and Walter admired his manicure—“is extraordinary luxury in an unexpected setting. There’s an element of surrealism to it, frankly. It’s a five-star experience in a place where your cell phone doesn’t work.”
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Alkaitis was interesting only in retrospect. He’d come to the Hotel Caiette with his wife, now deceased. He and his wife had fallen in love with the place, so when it’d come up for sale he’d bought the property, which he leased to the hotel’s management company. He lived in New York City and came to the hotel three or four times a year. He carried himself with the tedious confidence of all people with money, that breezy assumption that no serious harm could come to him. He was generically well dressed, tanned in the manner of people who spend time in tropical settings in the wintertime, reasonably but not spectacularly fit, unremarkable in every way. Nothing about him, in other words, suggested that he would die in prison.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
