Thoughts on The Passenger

                                                         “An instant from oblivion.

And I, remembering, would declare

That joy, not shame, is ours to share” - Stella Maris, Arthur Symons

When asked about what The Passenger is about I struggle. I could say it’s a story about a salvage diver who uncovers a plot about a missing passenger in a crashed plane, but what usually happens is I tend to spin off into a long winded explanation about how some of us are doomed to be endless wanderers in our own life. 

This is entirely why I love Cormac McCarthy’s writing so much.

He writes from his gut, from a place of total emotional resonance. This isn’t to say the man isn’t an intellectual. He works for the Santa Fe Institute for a reason. His prose just has so much humanity in it that it is hard to view him as this towering intellectual in the same way I view someone like Samuel Beckett. 

The Passenger, like all great art, is expressly interested in the question rather than the answer. The protagonist of the story, Bobby Western, is a Cal Tech dropout with a genius level intellect who gave it all up to become a salvage diver off the coast of New Orleans. His father is an architect of the greatest flash of destruction humanity has ever seen. Western is a victim of a cruel deterministic tragedy of the heart as he falls in love with his sister Alicia. The two of them stand diametrically opposed; she is a genius mathematician and he is a would-be physicist. In a particularly tragic section, Bobby says, “Physics tries to draw a numerical picture of the world. I don’t know that it actually explains anything. You can’t illustrate the unknown.” Western spent so much of his life trying to chart the unknown, and, by doing so he pushed himself even further into the void, a void he’s terrified of diving into as a salvage diver.

 Mathematics, and the study of it, is instead a sort of expansion of the subconscious. Words often fail to fully explain what our subconscious tells us as it often brings it to us in flashes of images or formulas. Alicia’s chapters are plagued by this strange band of carnival workers led by The Kid. A deformed child with a barbed tongue who torments Alicia, but who is also there to stand by her side no matter what. At first, you want to chalk this all up to being metaphorical, but as these segments compound, you realize that Alicia has fully let her subconscious into the real world. Maybe it’s a symptom of the paranoid schizophrenia that she suffers from, or maybe it’s because she didn’t spend all her life devoted to charting the unknowns of the universe. By allowing the unknown to stay exactly that you actually gain a better understanding of everything. 

As much as I love Western as a main character, and boy do I, I would be absolutely remiss if I didn’t talk about a character that has not left my head; Debussy Fields. Near the end of the novel Western asks her to read an unopened letter from his sister. We’re not privy to all of the information in the letter, just that it’s enough to make Debussy cry. She’s the last of the people in his life to figure out that Western’s only true love is not only gone and dead forever, but also his sister. She tells him what he wants to know from the letter and he walks her home. As she’s walking inside, she says, “You know I love you.” and He responds “I know. Another time. Another world.” It stands to me as one of the most heartbreaking things that Cormac has ever written. She’s reaching out to him in the only way she thinks she can. She thinks she can fill the Marianas Trench that is Western’s heart, but no one can anymore. He’s simply riding shotgun in a world he has no control over.

The Passenger is a full exploration of the quiet questions that sneak up on us. Are we going to forget our favorite smiles? Are we ever going to move past the worst traumas in our life or will it become them? I’ll end my thoughts with another quote near the end of the book “A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.”

Thanks for reading.