Ghosts and personal demons haunt the pages of The Glass Hotel. As Jonathan Alkaitis withers away in prison after he’s convicted for securities fraud, he is haunted by the ghosts of deceased investors whose lives were destroyed by his Ponzi scheme. At the same time, Paul is haunted by the ghost of Charlie Wu, the keyboardist in whose death he was complicit after he gave Charlie bad ecstasy at a Toronto night club. The presence of ghosts and personal demons in the novel poses questions about what kind of responsibility individuals have to each other. While the novel seems to accept that it may be impossible for individual people to enact real, meaningful change within social systems at a larger scale, it also seems to suggest that individuals still have a social responsibility to help others in a smaller-scale, more immediate sense. In other words, while people can’t help but participate in larger, problematic systems that oppress themselves and others, they still have a personal obligation not to throw their friends under the bus for their own personal gain. Through the presence of ghosts throughout the novel (representing guilt), the novel suggests that when people fail to honor their individual responsibilities toward others, they are haunted for the rest of their lives, unable to move on completely.
While imprisoned for fraud, Jonathan Alkaitis sees the ghosts of deceased investors whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed by his Ponzi scheme, insinuating that he feels (or should feel) responsibility for the key role he played in this mass misfortune. Try as he might to convince himself that his investors should have known there was something fishy about their near-perfect returns, the fact remains that Jonathan strategically ingratiated himself with investors and promised them investment returns he knew had no basis in reality. While Jonathan might make the feeble argument that he was only giving investors the returns they wanted to see, satisfying their greedy demands, it’s clear to everyone (and, ultimately, to himself) that the investors didn’t make him commit fraud: he arrived at this decision on his own. Furthermore, Jonathan’s poor decision-making results in dire consequences, bringing about not only financial ruin for his investors, but, in some cases, death. When Yvette Bertolli hears the news about the scheme, she dies of a heart attack, and it’s insinuated that Faisal, who had used his investments with Alkaitis as a way to validate himself in the eyes of his family, commits suicide out of shame. That Alkaitis sees the ghosts of Faisal, Bertolli, and other people while in jail makes clear that not only is Jonathan physically imprisoned, but he is also imprisoned within the emotional cage of guilt and personal accountability. Interestingly, the two ghosts Jonathan doesn’t see are those of Suzanne, his first wife and love of his life, who died of cancer, and Lucas, his older brother, who died of a drug overdose when Jonathan was a child. The absence of Suzanne’s and Lucas’s ghosts frustrates Jonathan greatly. Their very absence underscores the purpose of Jonathan’s ghosts, however. Jonathan isn’t visited by the ghosts of people for whom he grieves, but by the ghosts of people to whom he is morally indebted, suggesting that it is guilt and not grief that truly haunts people.
Unlike Jonathan, Paul never gets caught or imprisoned for the harm he causes, but he still sees the ghosts of people he’s hurt. The first ghost Paul sees is that of Charlie Wu, the keyboardist to whom Paul somewhat knowingly gave bad ecstasy at a night club in Toronto in 1999. Charlie’s heart stops shortly after taking the drugs, which directly implicates Paul in Charlie’s death. Paul never faces legal repercussions for his role in Charlie’s death. Though Paul is never accused of wrongdoing, he begins to see Charlie’s ghost after this event. The juxtaposition between the lack of repercussions Paul faces publicly and the internal torment he suffers as a result of these ghostly encounters illustrates that guilt is an internal prison, separate from external legal or societal punishment.
Through the presence of the ghosts, the novel makes clear that those who ignore the responsibilities that they have to others, those who act selfishly for their own benefit and in doing so cause harm to other people, will suffer regardless of whether they ever get caught. The novel portrays its characters as often selfish, but as also possessing (perhaps without realizing it until suffering the consequences) a moral core that induces profound and haunting guilt that will weigh on them when they fail to live up to their social obligation to others.
Guilt and Responsibility ThemeTracker
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Guilt and Responsibility 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.
I don’t hate Vincent, he told himself, Vincent has never been the problem, I have never hated Vincent, I have only ever hated the idea of Vincent.
It was a new century. If he could survive the ghost of Charlie Wu, he could survive anything. It had rained at some point in the night and the sidewalks were gleaming, water reflecting the morning’s first light.
“The point is she raised herself into a new life by sheer force of will,” Vincent’s mother had said, and Vincent wondered even at the time—she would have been about eleven—what that statement might suggest about how happy Vincent’s mother was about the way her own life had gone, this woman who’d imagined writing poetry in the wilderness but somehow found herself sunk in the mundane difficulties of raising a child and running a household in the wilderness instead. There’s the idea of wilderness, and then there’s the unglamorous labor of it, the never-ending grind of securing firewood; bringing in groceries over absurd distances; tending the vegetable garden and maintaining the fences that keep the deer from eating all the vegetables; […] managing the seething resentment of your only child who doesn’t understand your love of the wilderness and asks every week why you can’t just live in a normal place that isn’t wilderness; etc.”
“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.”
Ghosts of Vincent’s earlier selves flocked around the table and stared at the beautiful clothes she was wearing.
He doesn’t tell Julie Freeman this, but now that it’s much too late to flee, Alkaitis finds himself thinking about flight all the time. He likes to indulge in daydreams of a parallel version of events—a counterlife, if you will—in which he fled to the United Arab Emirates. Why not? He loves the UAE and Dubai in particular, the way it’s possible to live an entire life without going outdoors except to step into smooth cars, floating from beautiful interior to beautiful interior with expert drivers in between.
In the counterlife, Claire visits him in Dubai. She is happy to see him. She disapproves of his actions, but they can laugh about it. Their conversations are effortless. In the counterlife, Claire isn’t the one who called the FBI.
“The thing with Paul,” her mother said, while they were waiting for the water taxi on the pier at Grace Harbour, “is he’s always seemed to think that you owe him something.” Vincent remembered looking up at her mother, startled by the idea. “You don’t,” her mother said. “Nothing that happened to him is your fault.”
“It’s possible to both know and not know something.”
“I mean, here’s the question,” Joelle said, “and I’d be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts: How did he know we’d do it? Would anyone do something like this, given enough money, or is there something special about us? Did he look at me one day and just think, That woman seems conveniently lacking in a moral center, that person seems well suited to participate in a—"
One of our signature flaws as a species: will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.
“You know what’s permanent? You’re a person with a really excellent cocktail story. Ten, twenty years from now, at a cocktail party, you’ll be holding a martini in a circle of people, and you’ll be like, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I worked for Jonathan Alkaitis?’ […] You get to walk away untarnished.”
You can know that you’re guilty of an enormous crime, that you stole an immense amount of money from multiple people and that this caused destitution for some of them and suicide for others, you can know all this and yet still somehow feel you’ve been wronged when your judgment arrives.
“Well, look at it this way. I believe we’re in agreement that it should have been obvious to any sophisticated investor that you were running a fraudulent scheme. […] So in order for your scheme to succeed for as long as it did, a great many people had to believe in a story that didn’t actually make sense. But everyone was making money, so no one cared, except Ella Kaspersky.”
It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent.
There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for all of it.,”
“I was a thief too,” I tell him, “we both got corrupted.”