Glass Symbol Analysis

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.