Over the course of the novel, Theo’s trajectory is defined by swings between extremes of hope and despair. While everything that happens to Theo might seem remarkably dramatic, the novel emphasizes that the oscillation between hope and despair fundamentally defines the human condition. Theo’s story indicates that hope and despair feed off each other, with each one making the other inevitable. Furthermore, Theo—like many other characters in the novel—experiences addiction, and this escalates the existing back-and-forth between hope and despair that defines his life. The novel suggests that addiction creates an oscillation between hope and despair that is connected to the everyday experience of these emotions, yet becomes so dramatic and extreme that it stops a person from being able to process everyday life in a healthy, normal way. While swinging between hope and despair is an inevitable part of human existence, making these emotions even more extreme through substance use, gambling, or other addictive behaviors can destroy a person’s life.
The novel opens with two separate moments of despair separated by a moment of hope in the middle, thereby establishing the rhythm that will dominate the rest of the narrative. At the very beginning of the book, Theo is an adult in Amsterdam—drunk, high, paranoid, suicidal, and unable to leave his hotel room. At this point, the reader does not know the circumstances leading up to this state; the only thing that is clear is that Theo is in a state of utter despair. When the narrative jumps back to Theo’s life as a 13-year-old going to the Met with Audrey, it comes as a relief; yet the reader is also inescapably aware of the horror that lies in Theo’s future, making this moment of hope tainted by unease. Even in this opening contrast, the novel suggests that hope and despair are essentially inseparable.
The linked nature of these two opposite emotions sets in further after the terrorist attack at the Met and Theo’s realization that Audrey has been killed. Theo’s reaction to Audrey’s death sets the tone for how he will experience despair over the rest of the novel. Feeling numb and isolated from the world, he keeps secrets and has difficulty expressing his feelings, which of course only further cuts him off from others. When his circumstances seem to be improving (for example, at the prospect that the Barbours will “keep” him), he is hesitant about feeling too hopeful, and yet he can’t help but let himself believe that his life might actually get better. Of course, this results in feelings of regret, guilt, and shame when another disaster happens (such as when Larry shows up, taking him away from the Barbours’) and Theo lapses back into despair.
As the above examples show, even before Theo starts drinking and using drugs, he experiences extremes of hope and despair that, as the book will come to illustrate, are hallmarks of addiction. As is the case with Theo, addictions often begin in response to despair, and drinking, drug use, and gambling can be ways of dealing with despair—whether destroying it with (false) feelings of hope and elation, or numbing the feeling altogether. When Theo first starts drinking excessively and using drugs, he experiences a kind of wild, hysterical hope and joy. He describes these as “Wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death.” Yet as this sentence shows, this “giddiness and hysteria” come into relief against the death, horror, and despair that Theo has experienced.
Furthermore, Theo’s teenage years in Las Vegas show how hope and despair, while opposites, can come to resemble one another—particularly when they are muddied by the experience of substance abuse and addiction. During the period of the novel set in Vegas, Theo describes his experimentation with drinking and drugs as fun and exciting (if a little scary). Yet years after the fact, once they are adults, Boris tells Theo that when Theo was drinking to the point of losing his memory, he would often confess that he was suicidal—and even try to act on these suicidal feelings. What Theo describes at the time as exciting (and thus in a sense hopeful) actually involved him sinking into the depths of despair.
The blurred line between hope and despair works in the other direction, too. In his many states of despair, Theo experiences a lot of numbness throughout the novel (both drug-induced and otherwise) and paradoxically, this numbness sometimes takes the form of hope. Part of being numb, after all, is disconnecting from the (painful) reality in which you find yourself living. One demonstration of how numbness can be paradoxically hopeful comes when Theo learns that Larry has died. He reflects, “I didn’t cry. Though cold waves of disbelief and panic kept hitting me, it all seemed highly unreal and I kept glancing around for him, struck again and again by the absence of his voice among the others.” Here, Theo explicitly links his inability to cry (numbed emotion) with his “disbelief” and false hope that Larry is somehow still there. This detachment and delusion is exactly the kind of experience that Theo will later seek through numbing himself with opioids.
While Theo and many of the other characters in the novel experience literal addiction, the novel suggests that in in a way, addiction simply amplifies the existing pattern of hope and despair experienced by everyone. This is encapsulated when Theo quotes “another paradoxical gem of my dad’s: sometimes you have to lose to win.” Of course, this “wisdom” is something that Larry has gained from his experience as a professional gambler. The fact that it can be abstracted as a general statement again emphasizes the proximity between the patterns of experience produced by addiction and the hope and despair that characterizes life itself.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Hope, Despair, and Addiction ThemeTracker
Hope, Despair, and Addiction Quotes in The Goldfinch
“People die, sure,” my mother was saying. “But it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.”
Its weighty, antiquated quality, its mixture of sobriety and brightness, were strangely comforting; if I fixed my attention on it intensely enough, it had a strange power to anchor me in my drifting state and shut out the world around me, but for all that, I really didn’t want to think about where it had come from.
Before Boris, I had borne my solitude stoically enough, without realizing quite how alone I was. And I suppose if either of us had lived in an even halfway normal household, with curfews and chores and adult supervision, we wouldn’t have become quite so inseparable, so fast, but almost from that day were together all the time, scrounging our meals and sharing what money we had.
When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don’t change.
Well, kid, guess what? I’ve been around the track a few times—I do know. He's going to end up in jail by the time he’s eighteen, that one, an dollars to doughnuts you’ll be right there with him.
One commentator, in London, had mentioned my painting in the same breath with the recovered Rembrandt:… has drawn attention to more valuable works still missing, most particularly Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch of 1654, unique in the annals of art and therefore priceless…
I sold heavily altered or outright reconstructed pieces as original; if—out of the dim light of Hobart and Blackwell—the collector got the piece home and noticed something amiss […] then I—grieved at the mix-up, while stalwart in my conviction that the piece was genuine—gallantly offered to buy it back at ten per cent more than the collector had paid, under the conditions and terms of ordinary sale. This made me look like a goody guy, confident in the integrity of my product and willing to go to absurd length to ensure my client’s happiness, and more often than not the client was mollified and decided to keep the piece. But on the three or four occasions when distrustful collectors had taken me up on my offer: what the collector didn’t realize was that the fake—passing from his possession to mine, at a price indicative of its apparent worth—had overnight acquired a provenance. Once it was back in my hands, I had a paper trail to show it had once been part of the illustrious So-and-So collection […] I could then turn around and sell it again for sometimes twice what I’d bought it back for.
I’m so glad you’re going to be an official part of the family, that we’re going to make it legal now, because—oh, I suppose I shouldn’t say this, I hope you don’t mind if I speak from the heart for a moment, but I always did think of you as one of my very own, did you know that? Even when you were a little boy.
Because this is closed circle, you understand? Horst is right on the money about that. No one is going to buy this painting. Impossible to sell. But—black market, barter currency? Can be traded back and forth forever! Valuable, portable. Hotel rooms—going back and forth. Drugs, arms, girls, cash—whatever you like.
Because—they are saying, ‘one of great art recoveries of history.’ And this is the part I hoped would please you—maybe not who knows, but I hoped. Museum masterworks, returned to public ownership! Stewardship of cultural treasure! Great joy! All the angels are singing! But it would never have happened, if not for you.
Good doesn’t always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions. Scary idea!
Where’s the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I’ve seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?
Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in the immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
