Time's Passage

Hotel World is a novel built around the central theme of the passing of time, and it explores the ways we try to find meaning through by quantifying and measuring the world around us. This figures most centrally in the obsession, share by the ghost and by Clare, in discovering how long it took Sara to fall to her death. The ghost repeatedly asks the body if it remembers "how long" the fall took, and Clare takes up the same question when she throws objects down the elevator shaft. She even throws a clock down the shaft, which creates a dark parody of the idea of time passing before we die. Finally, she records the time it takes one of her shoes to fall by borrowing Lise's watch; her final words, in chapter five, relate to the length of the fall.

The section of Chapter...