The Passenger

“The real issue is that every line is a broken line. You retrace your steps and nothing is familiar. So you turn around to come back only now you’ve got the same problem going the other way. Every worldline is discrete and the caesura ford a void that is bottomless. Every step traverses death.”

In his typically cryptic manner, The Kid is talking about human lives in the context of linear time. The broken line represents the way the past is severed from us, and that there is no way to retrace our steps over something that has already happened.

“The low tide lapped and drew back. He could be the first person in creation. Or the last.”

The narrator describes Bobby Western on an isolated beach. The isolation from others is even more stark through the timelessness of the tide and the waves lapping on the beach. Bobby’s presence here represents total insignificance.

“I dont know who God is or what he is. But I dont believe all this stuff got here by itself. Including me. Maybe everything evolves just like they say it does. But if you sound it to its source you have to come ultimately to an intention.”

Debussy Fields says this to Bobby, and the passage is one of many where characters in the novel discuss the existence, or lack thereof, of God. In this case, Debussy’s inductive reasoning has led her to conclude that there is a God.

“You think that when there’s somethin that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be.”

Oiler says this to Bobby, but he’s not talking about literal snakebites. Instead, he could be referring to a spiritual malady, or a fear of Bobby’s that something just isn’t right in his world. Oiler suggests that no matter how Bobby might try to run, the fear will always be there, waiting.

“The weight of it moving over him. Endlessly, endlessly. In a sense of the relentless passing of time like nothing else.”

The narrator describes Bobby’s first dive in the Mississippi River. The weight is the current, but it could just as easily be referring to time. Time is portrayed as relentless, and endless. The river’s current and Bobby’s presence under the weight of that current show the inherent tension in how humans negotiate and understand time.

“If you’re listening to a conversation in a room and you stop and start listening to a different conversation you dont know how you do that you just do it. It’s all in your head. It’s not like moving your eyeballs. Your ears stay put.”

Many of The Kid’s commentaries in the book are much like this one. On the surface, there is apparent convoluted thinking, yet when the reader finally works through The Kid’s cleverness, the ideas are not as far-fetched as they first seem.

“The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here.”

The Kid’s sentiments here are echoed throughout the novel by the narrator and others. In The Passenger, the insignificance of the individual is a fundamental fact of existence.

“Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all.”

Bobby’s friend John Sheddan says this. John’s comments show one of the novel’s primary philosophical positions: Life is suffering that is only briefly and inexplicably interrupted. Grieving is central to living.

“Without malefactors the world of the righteous is robbed of all meaning.”

John Sheddan’s comment here illustrates the idea that a thing needs its opposite in order for that thing to have meaning. In this case, John refers to the “righteous”/ “wicked” binary, but the novel fairly teems with binaries throughout.

“Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagined.”

John Sheddan’s comment recalls Charles Baudelaire's famous poem “Les Fleurs du Mal.” In the poem, boredom is the unforgivable sin. John’s comments seem to suggest that boredom is the greatest danger to a productive and civilized society.

“You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life.”

Bobby’s grandmother Granellen says this to him while he is visiting her. Her comments suggest that in spite of the apparent meaninglessness in life, one still has the choice of whether to believe good exists in the world and that one can even increase the good in the world through one's own efforts.

“The time would come when all memory of this place and these people would be stricken from the register of the world.”

The narrator here is referring to impoverished people living in Appalachia. The register of the world is not written by those who are poor; whether they are remembered in any sense is entirely out of their hands. In the novel’s view, since their poverty represents consequences of commercialism, they will simply cease to exist even in history.

“You cant see what is coming, Bobby. And if you could it is no guarantee you’d make the right choice even then. I believe in God’s design. I’ve had dark hours and I’ve had dark doubts in those hours. But that was never one of them.”

This is spoken by Granellen, and again her optimism and faith clash with much of the darkness that the narrator and various characters focus on throughout the novel. Bobby’s views on the existence of God are murky and changeable, but many of the people he interacts with tend to believe.

“We got some herky jerky images of dudes and dudesses but they got no name. They used to have names but they dont anymore. The last witness who could have put a name to the faces is boxed up in the ground alongside them and if not nameless as well will soon be so. So. Who are they? The fact that they once walked about in the nomenclative mode is small comfort.”

In language that’s simultaneously flowery, crass, and morbidly funny, The Kid describes how the passage of time essentially obliterates the memory of people who once lived. According to The Kid, after time passes, the fact that at one time people lived in the world is insufficient proof that they actually existed.

“Beauty has power to call forth a grief that is beyond the reach of other tragedies.”

The PI, Kline, says this to Bobby after guessing that Alicia was beautiful. He sees in Bobby an abiding grief and posits that the loss of beauty calls forth a deeper sense of loss than anything else.

“Do you think you can learn all there is to know about yourself from yourself?”

Bobby’s friend Borman asks him this question. At the heart of the question is the nature of identity and what composes it. Borman has been living a very isolated existence, which may have led him to wonder how much of one’s being or nature can be known internally, and how much of it must be built through interacting with others.

“You dont know anything till it gets here.”

This is another comment by Borman. The uncertainty of the future that Borman mentions here seems loaded with a sinister element. Borman is implying the arrival of death when he makes this statement, and his comment reveals a blunt truth of life.

“He stopped to look back at his bare footprints. Filling with water one by one.”

Bobby’s footprints on the sand are filled in with water, which will eventually dissolve the footprints completely. This is another image that symbolizes humans’ experience of impermanence in the world.

“You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.”

The Kid says this to Bobby in the one scene where Bobby sees him. The Kid points out that the human attempt to make sense of the world is insufficient, that there is always something deeper and more mysterious beyond the human capacity to understand.

“History is a collection of paper. A few fading recollections. After a while what is not written never happened.”

This is spoken by Jeffrey, a fellow patient and friend of Alicia’s at the psychiatric hospital. Jeffrey raises the question of what happens to the past. If it is not recorded, what proof is there after time passes that anything ever happened at all?

“Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.”

John writes this in his farewell letter to Bobby. That suffering is part of the human condition is one of the book’s central positions. The second part of the quote suggests that though suffering is inevitable, how one responds to it is a choice.

“You cant help but think that they bring their despair into the world with them. Still I cant imagine that they cry in the womb. Even though they might want to.”

Miss Vivian, one of the hallucinations Alicia sees and hears, says this about babies. The question she attempts to answer in her conversation is whether babies enter into the world predisposed to suffering or if the world imposes itself and its indifference onto babies, which in turn causes the suffering. It echoes John’s sentiments from the previous quote.

“Here is the story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.”

The novel’s apocalyptic tone is evident in this passage. The quote also encapsulates one of the novel’s central concerns, namely what happens when there is nothing left from which humans can make meaning. This quote also hints at the moments before death in which every person must consider their life becoming extinguished.