Regret and Disillusionment Theme Analysis

There are very few characters in The Glass Hotel who feel satisfied with the trajectory of their lives. In her later years, Olivia Collins, a painter who is both a friend of Jonathan Alkaitis and an investor in his scheme, finds herself unable to make new art or recreate the moderate successes she achieved in the earlier decades of her career. Vincent achieves upward mobility when she agrees to pose as Alkaitis’s trophy wife, but she feels that she has sacrificed personal integrity by becoming so wholly dependent on another person. And after Alkaitis is jailed for his financial fraud, his guilt drives him to obsessive thoughts about his “counterlife,” an alternate reality version of what his life might have become, had he done things differently. Alkaitis’s “counterlife” becomes one of the novel’s key structuring concepts, with a multitude of other characters entertaining where their lives might have led them or who they might have become if they’d only acted a certain way, met a certain person, or lived up to a higher moral standard. The Glass Hotel’s use of the concept of alternate realities, or “counterlives,” is two-fold: on the one hand, the concept of counterlives entertains the notion that individuals really do have the power to transform their lives in meaningful ways—that an entirely different “counterlife” could be possible if a person had done one thing differently. On the other hand, though, the very fact that these counterlives remain hypothetical and irrevocably detached from reality suggests that such alternate realities are doomed to remain in the realm of the hypothetical and are mostly appealing to characters because they convey the unattainable. Through its exploration of characters’ counterlives, The Glass Hotel suggests that regret and speculation about unforged paths and unfulfilled dreams are a central and unavoidable part of the human experience.

In Alkaitis’s “counterlife,” he imagines a world in which he is able to pull off his Ponzi scheme for years and escape without suffering any legal consequences to live a life of luxury in a country without an extradition treaty to the United States. It is significant that Alkaitis’s counterlife offers a highly idealized version of events through which he cleverly avoids jailtime, and is not a story of self-redemption, nor is it one in which he avoids defrauding others in the first place. Alkaitis’s counterlife, then, isn’t an expression of remorse. Rather, it’s an exercise in wishing things weren’t the way they were: it’s an expression of disillusionment about the state of the real world. The lack of any meaningful introspection in Alkaitis’s counterlife means that it can only ever be a fantasy world. If Alkaitis were to repent his actions, he could attempt to make amends, and on that foundation form new relationships. But instead, he imagines an alternate reality that will never converge with the real world . That Alkaitis becomes so lost in his alternate reality that he is eventually diagnosed with dementia suggests, by extension, that those who focus solely on their disillusionment about how things didn’t go their way, rather than acknowledge their own role in whatever happened, will be forever lost in their regret.

Vincent also imagines a different world from the one that she inhabits. But in her daydreams she expresses her dissatisfaction with her current situation by imagining the ways her life actually could have been if she or others had made different choices. For example, during her tenure as Jonathan’s trophy wife, Vincent imagines “different permutations of [the] events” that led up to her meeting Jonathan: she imagines quitting her job at the Hotel Caiette before Jonathan arrived at the hotel the night they met, or that she did continue to work at the hotel, but Jonathan chose to order room service rather than sitting at the bar. Unlike Jonathan’s counterlife, which is characterized by idealization and unbelievability, Vincent’s “permutations” consist of small, entirely plausible adjustments that modify the course of her life in hugely meaningful ways. When Vincent observes that each of these alternate realities seems equally as “real” as her actual lived experience, she expresses an implicit regret about the “real” choices, the “permutations,” she and others could have made but simply chose not to. Vincent’s alternate realities articulate a remorse rooted in a person’s decisions rather than their destiny. They express a regret about her own choices, rather than the life not given to her. And while Alkaitis’s regret about what the world did to him leads him to get lost in a fantasy, Vincent’s regret about her own choices leads her ultimately to choose a more satisfying life on a cargo ship, and to realizations of the truth of her mother’s death that has always haunted her.

The presence of ghosts throughout the novel further emphasizes the nagging, haunting presence of guilt and regret. The novel repeatedly employs ghosts to illustrate characters’ guilt over the way they’ve oppressed others or failed to honor their obligations. Paul is haunted by the ghost of Charlie Wu after he gives Charlie the bad ecstasy pills that cause Charlie to overdose and die. And while Alkaitis is serving time in prison for securities fraud, he’s visited by the ghosts of former investors whose lives and livelihoods he destroyed with his Ponzi scheme. For Paul and Alkaitis, no amount of time or legal consequence is enough to fully eradicate the guilt they feel in the wake of such grave mistakes and miscalculations. Their regret will haunt them all their lives. In contrast, Vincent at the end of the novel herself becomes a ghost, free to travel the world, to visit Paul and to see her mother once more. Vincent, after much regretful introspection, continues to feel guilty about her role as a “thief” during life, but in acknowledging and accepting that guilt and regret—something neither Paul nor Alkaitis ever do—finds freedom and comfort, too.