The Guest

The final chapters of The Guest escalate quickly and end without a clear resolution.

At first, Alex is prepared to face what she’s been running from. With the Labor Day party a day away, she decides to confront Dom so she can truly have a new start with Simon. In facing Dom, Alex attempts to close the chapter of her chaotic and unstable summer in order to start again. But Dom’s quiet calm belies his obvious anger. Though it’s unclear what Dom can do to her, one thing that Cline alludes to is that Dom can expose Alex. If Dom finds Simon before Alex reunites with him, Dom will reveal the person Alex truly is, which will ruin Alex’s hopes for stability with Simon. Jack comes up with a solution for Alex’s problem with Dom because he has fallen in love with her. Jack has only known Alex for a couple of days, but he believes he is in love with her because she accepts him, has sex with him, and doesn’t acknowledge his lies, obfuscations, and mental health conditions. In Alex, Jack finds a pathway to liking himself. Using dramatic irony, Cline expresses how Alex takes advantage of Jack’s insecurities to achieve her own goal. Alex is planning on leaving Jack, while Jack believes that helping Alex deal with Dom will keep her tied to him. Her relationship with Jack is complicated by the fact that Alex wants to deal with her conflicts but remain dishonest with Jack.

Jack is a tool for Alex to use to survive. Alex is aware now of how fragile Jack is. Even so, she lies to him and tells him she loves him, disregards his real age, and doesn’t dig deeper into why he was forced to leave school and stay away from his ex-girlfriend. Alex has an acute capacity for empathy because she can see through people’s masks and identify what they need. Alex feels sorry for Jack, and her treatment and use of him is not absent real affection. She believes that she’s being kind to Jack by leading him on for one more night. Alex isn’t purposely callous, but she is ultimately on a journey to save herself, not Jack.

Inevitably, the situation with Jack escalates into a larger problem. It comes as no surprise that Jack has lied about the stash of money in his father’s safe. After all, it would make too neat an ending for Alex to be given money that she can use to pay off her debt to Dom without any strings attached and in such a quick turnaround. Jack’s lie comes from a place of wanting to be strong for Alex. But crucially, he also comes up with the lie while he is high. He and Alex consume molly, and this experience escalates Jack’s mental health conditions and pushes him to lie so he can keep Alex in his life. When it becomes clear to Jack that he’s going to lose Alex, he has a meltdown and crashes the car. The car accident is a climactic moment in which Alex is forced into pain and into acknowledging the wreckage she’s made of her life. The car accident also emphasizes the privilege gap between Alex and Jack. Jack will get in trouble for crashing the car, but ultimately, he will be shielded from real consequences. Alex, on the other hand, will not be protected. She leaves the scene of the accident because she has to break ties with Jack and fend for herself.

The car accident symbolizes Alex’s breaking point, but it is also a literal breaking point. For a long time, Alex has been abusing her body with drugs, alcohol, and lack of food. She’s spent a week sleeping on beaches, in bed with strangers, and on edge. The car accident injures her, but she ignores her pain so she can find Simon. Alex deludes herself into believing that Simon will be happy to see her, and because she has made the situation worse with Dom, has detached herself from Jack, and burned every other bridge, she has no choice but to fully commit to that delusion. The car accident is serious enough that Alex should receive medical attention. Instead, she pushes through her pain and the disturbing lack of care she has for her health. Nothing can get in Alex’s way to Simon, including a near-death experience. Alex’s refusal to accept the reality of her situation emphasizes the theme of Illusion and Deception Masquerading as Truth.

Cline’s ending is open-ended. The novel ends with Simon and Alex facing one another, Alex unable to move. Cline doesn’t describe the look on Simon’s face, only that it confuses Alex. Simon could be unhappy that Alex has wormed her way back into his life. But he could also be looking at Alex with concern, especially if she looks like she’s been in a car accident. Because Alex can’t be honest with herself, her depictions of her face and clothes post-accident could be fabrications and projections of her hopes that she’s fine and can make it to the party. Alex’s inability to move toward Simon also holds many implications. One reading of the ending is that Alex dies. This would evoke a structural parallelism. Throughout the novel, Alex has experienced disassociation with her body in which she doesn’t believe that she exists. In the beginning of the novel, she and Simon pass a car accident and Alex has a foreboding sense that she’s died in that accident. This scene could foreshadow her death from injuries sustained in a car accident. Another reading of the ending is that Alex realizes that Simon doesn’t want her back and her inability to move is her psyche’s response to the realization that Alex has run out of options to save herself.

The open ending allows Cline to emphasize the mystery that has always been part of Alex’s characterization. Cline never reveals why Alex got into sex work, why she doesn’t have a home to return to, or what ultimately happens to her. In creating these questions, Cline develops her heroine as an imperfect young woman beaten down by the challenges of life. Alex’s resilience is put to the ultimate test, and her open ending underscores the troubled relationship between Gender and Power Dynamics: Alex, like so many other young women, has been metaphorically chewed up and spit out by a society that uses her for her beauty and her charm.