49 pages • 1 hour read
Riley SagerLock Every Door: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Bartholomew
Content Warning: The source text references multiple deaths by suicide and deals with the psychological effects of trauma, loss, and grief. It also uses stigmatizing and potentially offensive language to refer to people experiencing mental illness.
The Bartholomew symbolizes wealth and power, connecting it to the theme of Wealthy–Vulnerable Power Dynamics. Located in New York City’s expensive Upper West Side neighborhood, the Bartholomew is a famous and imposing 13-story Manhattan apartment building. Its architecture is a key facet of its renown, with uppermost floors resembling a cathedral and lined with Gothic gargoyles. These physical aspects of the structure and its striking visual effects suggest a building that is important and highly visible throughout the city. Even New Yorkers like Jules, who aren’t members of the wealthy class, are familiar with the building and have heard the legends about it.
The Bartholomew’s management and residents discriminate against anyone outside of elite classes. The permanent tenants are all “very prominent people” who “don’t want strangers walking through their building” (34). They either inherited their apartments or managed to secure the Bartholomew unit of their choice by overriding the waiting list via money, power, or reputation. This suggests that living at the Bartholomew requires either generational wealth, significant power, or both. Furthermore, Leslie’s rules for apartment sitters reinforce the disparities between permanent residents and the temporary sitters. Because of the residents’ prominence, Leslie informs Jules that she shouldn’t bother them and should never discuss them outside the confines of the Bartholomew or on social media.
The Bartholomew’s secret organ-harvesting operation reinforces the building’s symbolism. Thomas Bartholomew designed and built the place as “a facility where important people could live in comfort and splendor” (329), while avoiding the typical ailments of the common classes. The structure erects a harsh barrier between the socioeconomic subsets of New Yorkers. Meanwhile, the building’s internal culture exploits members of the lower class. In these ways, the building functions as a microcosm of US socioeconomic and sociopolitical systems.
Heart of a Dreamer
Greta Manville’s novel Heart of a Dreamer is symbolic of fantasy and desire. Jules grew up listening to her sister read the book aloud to her and remains emotionally invested in the story as an adult. When she read the book as a child, Jules was transported away from the “row houses and storefronts with sooty windows” of her hometown to a magical, happy world where “childhood fantasies came true” (7). After her sister’s disappearance and her parents’ deaths, Jules’s stability fractured, but her dreams lived on. Her continued preoccupation with Heart of a Dreamer reveals her sustained desire to escape her difficult reality for a more idyllic life. In this way, her reliance on it is one of the Psychological Effects of Isolation and Loneliness she wrestles with.
The novel repeatedly depicts Jules relying upon and turning to Heart of a Dreamer for comfort. This is why she is eager to thank Greta for writing the book when she first meets her at the Bartholomew and why she forgives Greta’s initial coldness. She later tells Greta that she prefers “fantasy over reality” because of the family tragedies she has experienced (171). Indeed, Heart of a Dreamer consistently offers Jules an escape from her difficult circumstances. Fiction invites Jules into an ethereal realm that offers solace and dream fulfillment. For example, she regards Greta’s novel as telling a story with “the happy ending Jane deserved” (40). She chooses to continue to believe in this fantasy while living at the Bartholomew, deceiving herself and complicating her Pursuit of Truth in a World of Deception. The fictional tale offers Jules an alternate version of reality in which she and her family survive intact. However, when Jules’s reality at the Bartholomew begins to resemble a piece of horror fiction, she abandons fantasy in pursuit of the truth. The images of her burning both Erica’s and her own copy of Heart of a Dreamer represent her return to reality. She abandons her childhood dreams to overcome the difficulties of adulthood. At the same time, she reconciles herself with her sister’s disappearance and mourns this loss.
Family Photo
Jules’s family photograph symbolizes the Psychological Effects of Isolation and Loneliness. She keeps the framed photograph on her bedside table throughout the novel. The photograph’s placement conveys Jules’s longing for family, community, and love. She feels as if her parents and sister are nearby when she looks at the image. At the same time, the image is a constant reminder of what Jules does not have, extending the pain of her loss and her sense of alienation. In particular, Jules demonstrates the photo’s importance when she risks her life to return to the Bartholomew to recover it in Part 6. For Jules, parting with the image means losing her family all over again. She knows that going back to the building is dangerous, but feels incapable of losing the photo, because it is irreplaceable. These recursions of the photo underscore Jules’s loneliness and capture her attempts to alleviate it by maintaining her familial ties.
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By Riley Sager
