The Passage

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Parts 2-3

Parts 4-5

Parts 6-7

Parts 8-9

Part 10-Postscript

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Passages and Transitions

The title The Passage is significant in the novel. Taken literally, a passage is a pathway between two places. The word passage also means journey, as someone passes from one place to another. It can also refer to an excerpt of a book. Each part of The Passage begins with a poetic passage from a lauded poet: Even the act of opening a book and reading is a passage from one state to another, using passages as the delivery system for a story.

On a poetic level, a passage is a transition between conditions. This takes many forms, with the passage from life to death being the most significant. Lear writes to Paul from Bolivia: “What strange places our lives carry us to, what dark passages” (24). He’s writing prior to undertaking the word that will unmake the world as it was. The viral outbreak is a passage between the world without virals, and the world of the Colony, in which survival against the virals is the priority.

Passages can also represent a coming of age, or evolutions in a person’s life. Wolgast passes from husband, to father, to bereaved father, to ex-husband in a cruelly short time. He soon transitions from FBI agent to fugitive with a government asset in tow. Amy transitions from child to eternal child, the girl from somewhere to the Girl from Nowhere. Each new infection represents a passage from humanity to viral, from a concrete identity with ideas about life’s potential paths to an appetite and a loss of one’s memories. Their path back to humanity is what Lacey refers to when she tells Amy, “You will know how to set them free, to make their final passage” (717).

The idea of passages and transitions is more complicated with Amy, Lacey, and the Twelve. They do not experience time in a strictly linear fashion. Grey, the worker who releases the subjects, describes their experience well. Time “wasn’t a line but a circle, and even more; it was a circle made of circles made of circles, each lying on top of the other, so that every moment was next to every other moment, all at once. And once you knew this you couldn’t unknow it” (191). Amy, Lacey, and the Twelve have all acquired this knowledge, and they experience their lives—at least compared to humans—as every moment existing at all times, rather than as a sequence of events that eventually lead to death. For Amy and the virals, the passage of time loses significance because time is no longer the limiting factor on how long their lives will continue.

At the same time, it’s Amy’s goodness as a being that experiences time in this manner that frees humans from their viral state to their next step, which implies that there is something beyond even the virals’ eternal experience of time that gives humans, and their viral selves, meaning.

Vampirism as a Metaphor

When Richards watches the subjects, he thinks:

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? (86).

They don’t frighten him like the others on the project because he sees them as amplified manifestations of human traits. For Richards, their teeth, bloodlust, hunger, and need for darkness do not make them other. Rather, they are akin to humanity’s evolution of its—as most would say—worst instincts and traits.

Peter describes virals as “a being without a soul” (270), which makes sense, in Richards’s formulation. When a human is infected, it’s as if the virus replaces the soul and heightens the appetite for blood and violence. This is further reinforced at the final confrontation, when Amy helps the virals remember their names, and their identities return to them before death.

Despite the debates about what the vampires are, Babcock provides a critical insight while tormenting Theo. He says: “Babcock isn’t about making sense. Babcock just is” (577). Babcock describes himself as “forever. He was one of the Twelve and also the Other, the one above and behind, the Zero. He was the night of nights and he had been Babcock before he became what he was” (568). Viewed as humanity’s evolution into darkness and appetite, Babcock’s description makes sense. A vampire is a literal avatar of the darkness that takes humanity as its vessel.

Vampirism is similar to addiction, which many humans understand. Vampires are often the most sensual of the classic monsters. When the soldiers watch Dracula, they find Bela Lugosi’s slowness, languid speech, aristocratic manners, and “almost womanly face” (657) hysterical. He was a romantic, sensual figure: the opposite of the mass of “feral” virals. However, Babcock’s approach to invading people’s minds and controlling them involuntarily has more in common with Dracula’s appealing approach than the non-traditional hunting of the virals.

Vampirism also represents the desire for immortality. The virals in The Passage are not immortal, but the distinction is trivial, compared to usual human lifespans. Perhaps most important, thematically, is the requirement that vampires are made by their creators, usually against their will. The 12 death row inmates agree to the treatment, but they’re unaware that they are signing up to become vampires.

In The Passage, vampirism functions as a black mirror to humankind’s id and serves to usher in the ultimate war between humans and beings like Amy, representing the ego or superego, and the virals.

The Value of Life

Project NOAH begins out of loss—specifically, Lear’s loss of his wife. Her death gives him purpose. While he focuses on her life, his actions have consequences for the value of life as a whole. The project involves the use of death row inmates, which is significant given that they have demonstrated that they are sufficiently dangerous to others—and allegedly value the lives of others so little—that they await state-sanctioned execution. Yet not all the subjects are eager to die, even under harsh imprisonment. They’re willing to sign Wolgast’s forms because they desire life, regardless of what happens to them during the trials.

Wolgast finds less value and purpose in his life after Eva’s death and his subsequent divorce from Lila. They were his purpose, and his job does not replace them. Amy changes this and restores a sense of meaning to his life. In this way, life is given purpose or meaning in service to significant others, whether those others are one’s family by choice or by happenstance.

Lacey and the sisters value this life because they believe the actions of this life lead to the rewards or consequences during the eternal life to come. However, of the nuns, Lacey’s extended life gives her a unique perspective on whether a life is worth living simply due to its great length. Her forgiveness of the viral who bites her offers her this chance of prolonged life, and she uses it to help Amy bring this chapter of the war to a close. In this sense her goodness and service to others in a wider sense, not just her family, give her life meaning.

The novel’s pregnancies raise the familiar question—particularly in post-apocalyptic narratives—of whether it is ethical to bring a child into such a world. When Mausami becomes pregnant, it forces the question on her. Whether or why she values her own life is irrelevant: She does value the life of the child:

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 (438).

The humans in this story recognize that the world they are bringing babies into is at least as, if not more, grueling and bleak than the generations that came before. Yet, they have hope for a better future, and it is this hope that gives their lives meaning.

There is little sign that the virals can self-reflect, but they are confused, and they wonder who they are. In Chapter 69, Amy recites a long list of their names, restoring them to the lives and identities they valued, which allows them to die in peace. In the novel’s final act, Alicia tells Peter a simple, potent philosophy about valuing life, “We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we’re lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load” (629). Many characters in The Passage live lives of service to others. They ease each other’s burdens out of love. For Alicia, this is enough of a reason to live.