The Passage

“The war—the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand years more—the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are—would be fought by men like Richards.”

Richards remembers his excitement following the 9/11 attacks. They set the course for humanity’s new relationship with war, which was only a renewal of an ancient war. Richards’s worldview is hostile, xenophobic, and contingent on striking first. War, abhorrent to most, gives him a chance to distinguish himself.

“Wasn’t there something about them that struck a deep chord of recognition, even of memory? The teeth, the blood, the hunger, the immortal union with darkness—what if these things weren’t fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal?”

Richards is not as uncomfortable with the idea of vampires as others. He thinks vampires would be a manifestation of traits and appetites that humans already possess but amplified. Those who feel horror at vampires do not see themselves in them. The viewing of Dracula late in the novel reinforces this, when the soldiers mock Bela Lugosi’s vampire.

“In her mind’s eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death’s great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.”

Lacey cries at her vision of the end. Sometimes, she, Amy, and the Twelve experience time without linearity. Worse, she knows that her visions will happen, she just doesn’t know how long it will take for the country to collapse. She can only wait and play her part. Her horror at the doomsday vision is the opposite of Richards’s gleeful anticipation of the coming war.

“It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.”

Wolgast watches Doyle give a woman a false cover story at the fair. A life undercover, or on the run, or in denial, eventually leads to a new identity. The new identity replaces whatever was authentic. In a novel filled with personal transitions, Wolgast experiences this epiphany while a fugitive, passing through one of his false identities that would soon become real.

“For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is as bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell.”

Arnette thinks about Amy’s mother with horror. Ironically, the woman she judges gave birth to humanity’s greatest hope. That mother also abandoned that child. She has a bad beginning and a bad end, but her life doesn’t determine Amy’s future, and Arnette’s judgments don’t apply to her. Amy retains a child’s appearance, but after a century of life, she also retains some of her innocence.

“It was possible, he understood, for a person’s life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more instance in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas and, for whatever reason, made them your own.”

Wolgast believes that he will die when his time in the compound ends. He wonders why he wasted time obeying others and prioritizing their ideas and commands over his own desires. By the time he realizes he bonds with Amy, it is already too late for them to have a long future together.

“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”

Richards hears the alarm go off in the facility. The irreversible events that change the fate of the characters happen quickly. The recovery will take more than a century if it ever happens. Lear was searching for a cure to death, and in doing so he brought about an apocalypse. Lear either didn’t consider the potential consequences of his actions, or he ignored them.

“On a fading summer evening, late in the last hours of his old life, Peter Jaxon—son of Demetrius and Prudence Jaxon, First Family; descendent of Terrence Jaxon, signatory of the One Law; great-great-nephew of the one known as Auntie, Last of the First; Peter of Souls, the Man of Days and the One Who Stood—took his position on the catwalk above Main Gate, waiting to kill his brother.”

After the time jump, the reader encounters a new group of people. This first description of Peter shows the archaic (though in the future) style of naming and ranking employed at the Colony. Peter’s titles are reminiscent of a legendary hero, despite the fact that he inhabits the future a century later than Wolgast.

“It was more than physical attraction; it was the broken thing inside him she loved most of all, the unreachable place where he kept his sadness. Because that was the thing about Peter Jaxon that nobody knew but her, because she loved him like she did: how terribly sad he was. And not just in the day-to-day, the ordinary sadness everyone carried for the things and people they had lost; his was something more. If she could find this sadness, Sara believed, and take it from him, then he would love her in return.”

Sara contemplates her attraction to Peter. Peter is sad even before (he believes) losing Theo. His melancholy is so constant that it ironically makes her hope that if she can ease his relentless burden, he will reciprocate. Peter will later acknowledge that he was foolish to reject her, particularly once Alicia joins the sworn soldiers. Peter and Sara’s ill-timed attractions reinforce that life is most meaningful when shared.

“Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody’s business but yours.”

Sara waits as Mar mourns her husband’s situation. As a nurse, Sara is committed to helping whoever she can, but she knows that grief defies those efforts. Her description of grief also applies to the post-infection world as a whole. However, while the world’s grief is public, people suffer alone.

“He said books were more interesting than people.”

Michael remembers that Zander would read anything, even material that many would consider boring. In fact, he considered even boring books more interesting than most people, which made him suitable for the meticulous work in the Lighthouse, rather than a more forward-facing role in the Colony. This quote also allows Cronin to indulge in a moment of meta-fiction, which might remind readers that they are also engaged in a book at the moment.

“A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn’t care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you.”

Mausami thinks about their baby. Caleb’s birth will symbolize a part of the world’s renewal. She must believe that he will see the future, otherwise, there is little point in having children. Her pregnancy gives her hope that things may change, and that hope makes her fearful about failure.

“It’s different being afraid when there’s hope that it will amount to something.”

Sara writes about her contentment before leaving for Las Vegas. Her fear is manageable because she is not attached to specific outcomes. She is happy that she is with her people and that they have a shared mission. Fear without hope is a mere sensation, not an existential dread. Still, it is the group’s shared experience, however dangerous, that gives Sara the contentment she feels.

“That’s what happened, she knew, when a person had a baby. This strange new being grew inside you and by the time it was over, you were someone different, too.”

Mausami thinks about the strangeness of being pregnant while she is at the Haven. She feels that once she has the baby, her new life will begin, similar to when she began a new life as part of the Watch. The thought that she could become someone different exhilarates and frightens her. The pregnant women at the Haven have also changed due to their pregnancies, but at the expense of others’ lives.

“The journey had acquired a meaning of its own, intrinsic: to move, to keep moving. The thought of stopping, of reaching the end, seemed beyond Peter’s power to imagine.”

As they walk through Colorado, they do not know what they will find. It’s irrelevant to Peter at this point. They have experienced so much that it feels as though they have always been traveling, and that they always will. In a way, this helps him experience time more like Amy and Lacey, who do not have a linear view of time.

“We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we’re lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.”

Alicia encourages Peter to congratulate Hollis and Sara. In a situation with little hope, service is always possible, and acts as an antidote to misery. For Alicia, an opportunity to ease someone’s pressure and pain is purpose enough to continue. The fortunate find someone to help, rather than simply marching toward death.

“It’s all well and good to save the human race. You could say I’m in favor. But you might want to pay a little more attention to what’s right in front of you.”

Alicia points out that Peter is oblivious to the small picture. He was the last to know about Hollis and Sara, which was obvious to everyone. However, this quality also allows Peter to focus on the larger implications of their situation. Unfortunately, sometimes focusing on big issues cheats him of small, present satisfactions.

“He would have killed the woman, killed anyone. He would have done whatever they wanted. And once you knew that about yourself, he said, you could never unknow it. Whoever you thought you were, you were somebody else entirely.”

Theo hates that he would have eventually broken down and killed the woman in the dream. He feels that he learned something terrible about himself, and that knowledge haunts him. His identity is no longer that of someone who would never submit to coercion because it is not true. Only Amy stopped him.

“A man will happily die for his friends, but a woman—a woman makes him want to live. Once that happens, I promise you, he’ll walk through that gate and never come back.”

Vorhees describes the supposed reasons why the women must remain out of sight. He doesn’t want his men to betray their oaths, because in the book’s strongly hetero-normative portrayal, women are seen as giving men hope for a future family. This hope to have something to live for discourages them from dying for the greater cause of the war.

“The sadness you feel is not your own. It’s his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you.”

Lacey explains that Amy is feeling Wolgast’s longing for her. Part of Amy’s burden is that she feels the pain of many, not just hers. Feeling Wolgast’s sorrow vindicates her love for him, and makes their brief reunion—if in fact, that’s what it is—at the novel’s conclusion more poignant. Wolgast has not moved on. He’s still sad, and he has felt this way alone until now.

“It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop.”

Lacey thinks about the weeping man who carried her away from her death and that if God created the world, it’s hard to imagine that God wouldn’t weep at the state of humankind. In fact, she can’t picture many situations that wouldn’t be reasons for crying.

“I think because he could. That is the reason for most things people do. He was not a bad man, Peter. It was not entirely his fault, though he believed it was. Many times I asked him, ‘Do you think the world could be unmade be men alone?’ Of course it could not. But he never quite believed me.”

Lacey explains Lear’s reason for Project NOAH, which aligns with her view of human nature. He took an inordinate risk, but also an inordinate level of responsibility. If Lear hadn’t figured out the experiment, someone else eventually would have. He was grieving, brilliant, and curious, which proved a grave combination.

“The body they had buried might have been a viral, but the person they had buried was a man.”

Peter thinks about the differences between virals and humans as they bury Galen. He was restored to himself, like Babcock’s virals. Later, he learns that Amy restored Babcock’s virals before their deaths. They had existed as mere appetites and pawns until she gave them peace. Galen retained enough of himself to refrain from hurting Mausami and Theo, so he never made the full transition.