The Dream Hotel

Elias, Mohsin, and Mona represent Sara’s family unit, although only Elias has distinct characterization. Mohsin and Mona are extensions of Elias and Sara’s relationship, and are too young to have distinct personalities, functioning more as symbols of Sara’s desire for freedom and love. Mohsin and Mona are typical toddlers, and their separation from their mother makes them distant and distracted from her, which hurts her emotionally. Elias is characterized as reckless and passionate, but also practical and withdrawn; his complexities feed into Sara’s own and create conflict between them and with the overarching threat of Madison and Safe-X as a whole. Elias believes that Sara can get out of retention by following the rules and is not always compassionate about how difficult her life has been and how complex the system that entangles her is. His lack of experience with the bias that she faces characterizes him as fundamentally incapable of fully grasping her experiences, although he can help comfort her and support her through them.

The novel is often deliberately vague about Elias’s life and experiences, since Sara does not know what he does while she is in retention. While his feelings and responses are often understandable, if not justifiable, Sara’s perspective as the narrator and protagonist often casts him in a negative light. In many ways, Elias is Sara’s foil; his perspective is uninformed and limited based on his individual experiences, yet he goes through his own traumas during their separation. While the narrative implies their marriage begins to recover after she returns home, by the end of the last chapter, he is never named—simply referred to as “her husband.” This represents Sara’s faded connection with him as a person and his reduction to a role in her life, something he will have to fight his way out of if he wants to regain the intimacy they once had.

Hinton is one of the primary antagonists of the work and occupies a complex role as Sara’s personal tormentor and yet the object of her unwelcome sexual desire. As the Senior Attendant, he is second-in-command at Madison and has immense power over all the retainees, which he utilizes to torment them when they do not follow his commands. Hinton is cruel and manipulative, but ultimately bland; he derives his personality from the power he wields and is uninteresting without it. This is reflective in his appearance, which Sara describes as blandly attractive except for the burn scar on his neck, which gives his otherwise boring face some interest.

While he harms all of the women, even sexualizing them through jokes in staff meetings, Hinton has a specific vendetta against Sara for her intelligence and capacity to resist, and targets her more than the other women—forcing her to layer on shirts as punishment for taking off her clothes, sexually harassing her, and stealing her belongings, going so far as to read her dream journal with no intention of returning it to her. Despite his abuses of his power, he largely goes unpunished through the end of the novel. Sara briefly threatens to report him for neglecting his duty during the wildfire, but this never actualizes, and he ends the novel telling her he hoped she had a pleasant stay. Hinton is a flat character as a result. He represents the sorts of people who are attracted to having power over others—even if Hinton were to leave, another Hinton would take his place. Sara’s sexual attraction to him represents her desire to comply with the system at the cost of her own dignity, and her rejection of Hinton by the end of the novel—even rejecting her own dream journal in favor of her strike—represents her acceptance that compliance can only lead to dehumanization.

The Madison CRO is the major antagonist of the work, even though his impact is far less direct and personal than Hinton’s. The CRO is an unnamed man, with his name blacked out in all the official documents, and his appearance is similarly disguised: “she still doesn’t know what he looks like, his face being shielded by a surgical mask” (270). Like Hinton, the CRO is a faceless representation of corporate greed and rejection of humanity, which is best represented through his distance from the actual retention center—despite his job as the chief officer, he primarily works offsite, finding new ways to make money for the company and use the women as tools rather than people. Through his actions, he is characterized as greedy, inhumane, and willing to shift the blame off himself onto his employees for his own personal gain.

The CRO’s primary interests are Safe-X’s, not personal; it is implied that whatever benefits Safe-X also benefits him. He rebukes his own employees for mocking their workplace on social media (because it affects Safe-X’s image); he refuses to buy needed supplies and encourages the nurse to reject care for more women (because it saves Safe-X’s money); he projects an image of productivity and positivity through his announcements to the facility (because it protects Safe-X’s reputation). By the end of the novel, he personally attends Sara’s hearing to ensure she is freed because she has become a drain on his resources. Sara’s anger at him is justified, and his lack of response to her cursing demonstrates his inhumanity even further. Like Hinton, the CRO does not grow or change across the narrative. His character is fundamentally integral to the conflict within the book, but ultimately replaceable; anyone could be the CRO, and anyone could become him if given enough power.

The other women in retention—particularly Toya Jones, Lucy Everett, Marcela DeLeon, Victoria Aguilar, and Emily Robbins—all have distinct characteristics but function as a unit, with their different personalities exploring different facets of Sara’s thoughts and the truths about retention/imprisonment. Lucy and Marcela function as antagonists, while Toya, Victoria, and Emily are allies, but all five of the women are portrayed as complex individuals with unique needs and lives outside of retention. Sara’s understanding of them changes throughout the book, but few of them have individual arcs, instead responding to Sara and their environment as events progress.

Lucy represents the antagonism between the women, as stirred up by Madison to keep them from unifying. Lucy is older and no-nonsense; she was an accounting clerk for a real estate company before her imprisonment. She gets released early in the novel, and Marcela accuses her of having a history or predilection for pedophilia, although it is unclear how accurate this is. Marcela’s anger at Lucy throughout the novel, and her repeated decision to reveal Lucy’s secrets and then fight her, proves that the women will find any reason to betray each other to justify their own feelings of innocence. Marcela’s treatment of Lucy does nothing to benefit Marcela except personally, and her cruelty ends up harming the other women by extension. Marcela is in her twenties and is a musician, a guitarist for an indie band. Marcela has a restraining order against her because she reported her neighbors’ unlicensed daycare, and they began reporting her for noise disturbances and trashing her yard, even cutting down her tree. They got footage of her retaliating by smashing their fence with a bat, and running a red light earned her a long stint in retention. Despite her projection of an image of resistance and rebellion, Marcela refuses to join Sara’s strike and ends up benefiting from the system as a result, earning her guitar as a privilege. Marcela represents the benefits and losses of compliance; while she gets her guitar, she loses her social circle, as Sara and the others slowly draw away from her to protect themselves.

The other three women are Sara’s friends; Emily is Sara’s roommate, a firefighter and aspiring comic book artist, while Toya becomes Sara’s closest ally and Victoria is the most active resister, becoming an icon of rebellion and human rights within the facility. Emily is kind, somewhat shy, but brave, while Toya is down-to-earth, stubborn, and loyal. Victoria is less present in the book throughout but is described as young and beautiful—even using her appearance to manipulate Officer Williams—and reveals herself to be cunning and insubordinate, willing to break the cameras and risk extended retention to give the women privacy. Emily and Toya both have recurrent medical issues that the retention center refuses to help them treat, and Victoria is eventually sexually harassed by Williams, which she is punished for since he has more power over her; all of their experiences unify them in the strike and represent the lack of human rights the women have as retainees. All three women represent the social circle Sara needs to resist the pressures of retention, since without their friendship and support, she is isolated and alone in her resistance.

Among these women, Victoria Aguilar stands out as a figure of unshaken resolve. Though she initially appears backgrounded, her quiet defiance becomes crucial as Sara’s resistance grows. Unlike others, Victoria never capitulates to the system’s manipulations. She engages in small acts of rebellion without needing permission or consensus. In this way, she emerges as a natural successor to Sara’s leadership by the novel’s end. Her youth and clarity of purpose suggest a continuity of resistance, hinting that the spirit of revolt outlives any one leader, even when that leader is abruptly removed.