Glass symbolizes a person’s capacity to hurt and be hurt by others. More generally, it represents the vulnerability every person has to be complicit in actions and systems that affect the lives of others, and to have their own lives affected by those larger systems. There’s a certain honesty and vulnerability inherent in the material of glass: it’s easy to see through, and easy to break. The interactions characters have with glass throughout the novel draw attention to the vulnerability inherent in existing as a human among other humans: the ways a person’s actions have consequences that may radiate far beyond their immediate surroundings, making them complicit in the oppression of others, and people’s corresponding ability to become victims, themselves, of those same systems.
The first major scene with glass occurs in a flashback Paul has to one of the last times he saw Vincent, when she was just 13 years old and had just graffitied the words “sweep me up” (supposedly the philosopher Kierkegaard’s final words), in acid paste, onto one of her school’s glass windows in Port Hardy. Vincent writes the graffiti shortly after the death of her mother, and it’s clearly a visual manifestation of her inability to confront and make sense of the trauma of her mother’s death. By extension, then, the pain that Vincent puts on display when she vandalizes the glass window is a reflection of her vulnerability: of her ability to be hurt, too, as a consequence of things that happen to others. It also follows that the visual, explicit nature of Vincent’s mode of expression—the vandalization of a public space—creates the opportunity for Vincent to hurt and affect those who might see her vandalization. In this way, glass presents a reciprocal pain relationship: people can be hurt by other people, but they can project that pain onto others as well.
This isn’t the only time glass is used as a canvas on which to display one’s pain. The other major appearance of glass occurs at the Hotel Caiette, when Ella Kaspersky bribes Paul into scrawling a threatening message for Jonathan Alkaitis onto the glass wall of the hotel lobby. Similar to Vincent’s graffiti 10 years earlier, Kaspersky’s grisly message, “why don’t you swallow broken glass,” has dual resonances. It’s a reflection of the pain and frustration she feels at failing to bring Alkaitis to justice for his fraudulent scheme, but it’s also a symbol of her ability to inflict pain on others. The message, “why don’t you swallow broken glass,” is a quote from Alkaitis’s now-deceased wife, Suzanne, who uttered the violent words to Kaspersky at a restaurant years before. Resurrecting Alkaitis’s dead wife’s words and repurposing them as a threat against him is Kaspersky’s attempt to inflict pain on Alkaitis. Kaspersky’s message results in unintended pain, too: the violence inherent in Kaspersky’s message thoroughly disturbs the few people who do manage to see it, such as Walter and Vincent.
In these two instances, and in other moments that prominently feature glass, the novel uses glass as a vessel through which to convey one’s ability to hurt and be hurt by others. Like a transparent pane of glass (in which one can see and be seen by others), vulnerability and complicity are a two-way street.
Glass Quotes in The Glass Hotel
But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself. Just because you used your stepmother's presumed death to start over doesn’t mean that you're not also doing something good, being there for your sister or whatever.
“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.”
“What I’m suggesting,” Caroline said softly, “is that the lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world’s just a little too much to bear. If you can’t stand to look at the world directly, maybe it’s possible to look at it through the viewfinder.”
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