!!!!!SPOILERS!!!!!
If you’re feeling confused by the Passenger, don’t worry: many professional critics with fancy degrees have flocked to the pages of international papers to accuse McCarthy of drifting and storyless nonsensicality.
But The Passenger’s code is relatively simple to crack. McCarthy has made two unusual choices, and once you understand them, the book could not be clearer. It becomes a work of masterly simplicity in which every part makes sense, and the only mystery left is the one McCarthy is addressing.
The first choice is a doozy and only becomes obvious after a few hundred pages of misdirection. At first McCarthy wrongfoots us: we open the book and find a flambé of red herrings spiced with many literary conventions that we normally associate with plot and action. There’s the spare, vigorous style we recognize from Hemingwayoids or event-heavy thrillers. There’s the ominous aura of impending danger generated by risky work, enigmatic corpses, and tight-lipped government agents. And there’s Western, exactly the sort of manfully manly man that we’d anticipate to be an expert gunner full of impulsive and powerful action. But then we read on—and we discover that the taut style gets used for table debates on seemingly arbitrary subjects, the promised danger barely develops and never blossoms into violence, and the hero turns out to be a Hamlettish drifter who doesn’t act, doesn’t change, doesn’t even fight or get hurt or die. McCarthy has tricked us, we feel, after we have accepted the reality of his first big structural choice: that he has backgrounded plot and story in order to foreground the development of his themes. This book is conceptual.
Why does it feel confusing? In part because many of us, including those who have plummy gigs writing about art we don’t understand, have been trained to expect stories to develop around a character’s progression. To be more precise, many readers operate out of a sense that properly constructed stories follow active characters pursuing desires, the story snapping along in a chain reaction of scenes in which the characters have their wants blocked, delayed, or subverted in gripping ways, their arcs building toward a satisfying conclusion that leaves the heroes internally transformed or possibly dead. In such stories, everything that happens should progress the plot—as many creative-writing manuals numbly repeat. And this form of story dominates the market. McCarthy may be drawing on a lush and lofty tradition of philosophical fiction that structures its stories not around plot but around the building of an argument1, a ruminative method wherein dialogue is dialectic and characters are embodied ideologies—but such books are exotic and can strike the unprepared reader as nonsensical, unfinished, or badly constructed, since the theorizing writer has tossed many conventions out of his tinted window, burning rubber and blasting loud descriptions as he races off in dogged pursuit of his white whale.
But McCarthy’s second unusual choice puts up another barrier to quick comprehension. Not a few critics faceplant into confusion here after successfully hurdling the first obstacle. Unaware they’re about to splat, such paragons mutter, “Mystery solved—that sly old wolfhound has composed a novel of ideas. Lady Fortune be thanked that my sojourn at Oxford prepared me exquisitely for this skirmish of wits!” Then, after a sip of tea fortified with brandy, the critic manqué tries to put two and two together—and gets three. What’s going on?2 What’s with The Passenger’s random, seemingly disconnected topics? Why do the scenes lie side by side and refuse to be stacked on one another?
Well, most offputting of all, McCarthy has eschewed even the linear, cumulative building of an argument. Instead, he has employed an almost fractal, rhizomatic structure of spiraling negation, in which every scene, character, and conversation works outs its own wrinkle of McCarthy’s governing themes—themes I’d summarize (and please forgive the inadequacy of this description) as the fragility of existence and the limitations of knowledge. View any element through these topical lenses, and its meaning in the greater scheme will topple into place, as McCarthy challenges and complicates physics, mathematics, gender, fine language, technology, living on the land, media, history, nation, war, religion, the prohibition against incest, aloneness and togetherness, grief and sanity and love—the list death-rattles on, into an all-encompassing and universal destruction of life and monument and meaning. The Passenger is an omni-dissolver, an intergalactic acid rain, a necromantic encyclopedia whose entries are unfamiliar tarot cards. One commenter complained that the pieces don’t add up… he was right. These pieces subtract.
Once you see this lattice of dissolution, some symbols become so plain that they hardly need conjecture. Of course, like any complex ideas their meanings will shift depending on the light your mind casts—but please forgive me when I offer a few clumsy and insufficient speculations. I’d hazard that the missing pilot’s trunk signifies something like unattainable knowledge, that the implied aliens resemble the unseen Other hovering in the penumbras beyond the charmed circles of our little lives and even littler minds, and that Western’s profession as a deep-sea diver mirrors his languid search for knowledge and life through the perilous darkness of the world—too bad he’ll only ever find a planeful of dead passengers with a missing black box (and I mean that metaphorically.)
The government, well. They’re mostly just the government.
The passenger motif is more complex, a many-faced and resonant symbol which I don’t think can be fully unpacked, much like the lighthouse in Woolf, the frontier in Xue, the cockroach in Lispector. Yet McCarthy gives us one clue when he uses the word to describe birds tuckered on the beach, so weary they won’t fly a hand that could crush them—very much like Western. Surely these birds, worn down unto death after crossing in a storm, stand not just for themselves, not just for Western, but for all humans; for at last, shorn by the dialogues in The Passenger of all tradition, pretension and illusion, having outlived God, we are animals cursed to think, fragile brain-conveyances in transit through an inimical world that one day will pluck us out from itself without even noticing. All living things are passengers through time and space, riding at the same speed toward the same end.
That’s one potential meaning of passenger. Another shows up when Alice’s hallucinations claim that they ride on the bus to visit her. This almost Vaudevillian discussion centers on the paradox of mental constructs being obliged to move through the real world, in one of many instances where McCarthy hazes the boundaries between physical and psychic reality; but the humor also distracts us from the otherwise obvious point that the hallucinations are her passengers, comparable to her mathematical and other intellectual abstractions, as just particularly vivid and tangible concretizations of the psychic constructs that ride around inside all our brains—those electric vortexes where simulated people blend into their perspectives and live on long after their bodies have been violated by death. Alice herself will become a construct riding in her own brother’s head, slowly losing her face but still realer to him than the reality he’s passing through, a beautiful wraith who’s finally only an idea of beauty—but who nevertheless governs his life in exile, locking him into his lonely groove.
Western may be alone, but in a deeper sense he and we are never truly alone, our experience of the world never pure and unaccompanied; leaving our homes in the morning, we step into a crowd of the ghosts we’ve brought along, and we are ourselves are just 1000 ghosts in a coat. We are passengers in a world of passengers, on a planet that passenges3—nevertheless, each of us is also a planet full of life, full of buses packed with hallucinations, of fractured reflections of everyone and every idea we’ve ever known.
Note too that McCarthy is not speaking about the driver: to compare us or anyone to the driver would impute too much control, freedom, will, just as in the old lie of the self-caused cowboy that McCarthy has long deconstructed. The symbol of the passenger is the lotus spreading over the book’s red-veined thought.
Alice is the bone Buddha in that lotus, the skeletonized key to deciphering the book. When McCarthy juxtaposes her Wonderland phantasmagoria and her mathematical abstractions, he seems to be suggesting that to some extent all theoretical knowledge is analogous to schizophrenia, in so far as intellectual systems, built on perceptions and inductions, are never the territory and only wild and misled maps, only complex projections based on conjectures and assumptions liable to be overturned, only incomplete and confused attempts to explain a universe that may well never yield up its most fundamental answers, which anyway we’d only ever see through a formula darkly, an image blurred by the act of looking. Connect all the dots and you’ll still get only a drawing.
But finally the book contradicts a straightforward diagnosis of schizophrenia and, as the story winds down, emphasizes the lucidity of her existential vision. Unlike her father, who chose a partner based on appearance, used his gifts to create destruction and was therefrom destroyed—and unlike her brother, who back then was still lost in illusions of his own agency and power and importance—Alice could never wrest herself away from fundamental questions about herself and the universe, could not forget the meaninglessness of meaning, turn to the soothing world of appearances, or even distract herself from the one real romantic love she’d ever felt. She may have tried sex or working as a barmaid, to fit herself into the paths and compromises that human society provided, but her suffering drove her on and through to breakdowns, to roombound paralysis, to an anorexia that reified her rejection of the world and perhaps of herself, and finally to suicide, all because she could not stop seeing or feeling. If only she could have experienced tangible love between two humans who adore each other, who sleep woven into one respiring mass and wake up to smile at each other in the dark… It seems nobody but her brother and nothing but love could have saved her. Her transcendent mind took apart anything else, yet she could neither dismantle her own feelings nor reach out for her person. That denied love becomes the most luminous ghost in the book, the only spectral sunray that could have lightened the siblings’ passage.
Alice may, in part, stand in for the author himself, whose motley characters waltz onto Western's stage and perform just like her day demons, their palaver both guiding us and thwarting our ability to know. The dual sister/brother structure of each chapter unpacks into a symmetry—Alice's scenes are sister to her brother's scenes, every chapter a diptych whose hallucinations are slanted in her italics and straight in his roman font. To the right, a polyphony scraping away at the human world. To the left, the many sides of the suicided deaconess of dream, imagination, and knowledge. Like her, McCarthy sees too much, and the seeing builds into a universal cancellation. If you want to understand his thoughts, I believe you can partially extrapolate from what she says—although she's also just a character and never simply identical to the author.
Alice is dead, but Western is alive. Alice is thought, but Western is flesh or action. Western's name indicates, I believe, how he is an avatar of almost all the trad manly virtues embodied by the archetypical Western hero—individualism, self-sufficiency, expertise, efficiency, closemouthedness—and how, through him, the book drives the logic of that type toward its lonely, doomed and insufficient conclusion, Western the passive and defeated final form of McCarthy's much-used figure of the antiheroic get-'er-done do-nothin’. In Blood Meridian, the Kid drifts but also kills and parties and fights for life; in Suttree, the titular character drinks his days away, waiting for something to happen, yet still moving, fucking, eating mushrooms, flying the hounds of death; but in The Passenger, Western can barely be roused to escape, stung into numb inaction, bedeviled by cosmic knowledge and unchangeable histories. McCarthy's previous heroes also committed much violence and had it committed against them—but Western, as befits a character written by an elderly man, is just a broken mote facing vast, impersonal, and inexorable forces. No amount of violent action will help him or solve any of his problems.
He may start off driving fast in a fancy car, yet he gets nowhere, finds out nothing, and has even that luxury wagon, the last illusion of his active and dominating power, stripped from him by an invisible hand. He used to think he was a driver, but came to understand his true status as passenger... In Western, the man of action completes his transformation into the man of thought, still tough and able and expert, still strong, but paralyzed by the past and other ultimate truths, haunted to a standstill by having failed his sister and by what it means to be a transient and scale-eyed human in an impersonal world that, one way or another, will disintegrate into absolute nothingness.
The neutering of Western's agency, his amberization in grief, is the story's natural conclusion and the convergence of its themes. The hero of such a story cannot be more active, cannot be a typical protagonist surmounting obstacles in pursuit of a desire; he can only flee and hide, sit in silence, dream and converse with the dead. Hamlet was trapped in inaction, yet we sense that had he acted, he may have saved the day; Western’s quandary is more severe, for there is very little left to save. Maybe before his sister died, he could have committed some crucial action, but not now, and in any case not against his mortality and basic exiguity. And anyhow could he truly have acted differently back then? Do we have free will? Do we drive ourselves? McCarthy has been making these inquiries throughout his career, yet never has he posed them with such grace, completion, and total true doomerism. Even the final question of eternal redemption, the salvation promised by God, is left open like a wound that won't close—but I gotta say that funeral for Him was not looking promising.
After all this annihilation, what's left? Not much remains to console us. There's love, at least for some. There's also humor, conversation, language and good food, the manifold pleasures of companionship—small but real comforts poised against inexorable loss. The final balance reminds me of Ecclesiastes, which advises readers to enjoy their loves and lives, then climaxes on visions of great crowds shambling into graves. “Vanity of Vanities! All is vanity…”
Conceptually, The Passenger is McCarthy's masterpiece and serves as a capstone for his entire corpus. I love the texture of the early books more, because I’m addicted to fine descriptions and McCarthy made some of the best I’ve ever poured into my eyes; but The Passenger says everything, wraps his lifework into one catastrophic and overwhelming statement, and transcends his old relatively limited methods of fictionalized argumentation. I am in awe of those last crumbling steps toward universal desolation. The Passenger is everything I want literature to be. It's the best book I've read this year. It might well be the best he has ever written. So I’ll give you a warning: for the next little while, if you wander too close to me I’ll grab your collar and rant at you Dostoevskishly about this gilt-and-blood-edged grimoire until the royal guards clatter in and pull me off still raving, still woefully inarticulate, and still (of course) no closer to true knowledge about this book or indeed anything else.4
For example, Infinite Jest is notoriously a book whose progression makes no sense until you begin to read it as an argument or dialogue of themes, at which point its jigsaw of ideas shimmers and goes transparent. A certain famous critic, displaying all the perspicacity endemic to her sterling profession, accused that tome of simply stopping at its end—but she’d missed that Wallace’s thematical discussion had concluded with the last scene of the book, and that the plot had been purposely deemphasized, its loose ends left lying around for the geeks to piece together as a secondary bonus. Not every book has to be about the development of its characters, and not every character has to be realistic or to talk like a real person! Come on! Furthermore, most of Wallace’s fiction is determined by his conceptual frameworks—if you found Oblivion or Girl with Curious Hair confusing, try reading the stories as staged analyses of problems. Other books structured somewhat like The Passenger include 2666, Ferdydurke, The Argonauts, What We Can Know About Thunderman, much work by DeLillo and Pynchon, and a trifling little book you may have heard of called The Brothers Karamazov, as well as countless other paragons of the experimental or encyclopedic or philosophical or deconstructive genres. In music, Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James Album performs an analogous switch of background and foreground, so that the melody, usually the locus of development, repeats or barely develops, while the beat continually mutates on the center stage between your ears. When as a near-child I first heard this inverted music, it sounded indefinably wrong, shattering rules I didn’t know were rules—but then after I’d listened long and openly enough, my perspective flipped, and once again new artistic vistas disclosed to me their luscious pleasures. Through such art, one can learn entirely new ways of reading and listening.
I don’t blame regular readers for their embittered bafflement. Critics I do, since they’re professional thinkers and are supposed to meet new art with the assumption that its strangenesses and eccentricities mean something, even if the pattern so formed is not instantly apparent. How many critical misprisions (including my own) have arisen from a lack of proper humility?
Yes, I made this verb myself. It means “to act as a passenger.” If you’d like to use it, the charge is only $7.99 for the first appearance in a given text and $2.99 for each use thereafter. If you are a transport-company representative, you should contact me privately for the corporate discount.
Everything I just wrote is speculative and potentially obtuse. Luckily, The Passenger was not hurt in the writing of this post, for a book’s essence flies far beyond the reach of such profane interpretation. By reading this line, you agree that I cannot be held responsible for misleading you nor for any psychic consequences that might result from confusion, irritation, or wrongheadedness induced by a criminally incomplete and moon-dazed analysis. I am, after all, nothing better than a critic.