46 pages • 1 hour read
Cormac McCarthyThe Passenger
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Nature of Reality
The novel takes on this theme from multiple perspectives. For one thing, the novel explores the intersection between math and physics. There is much discussion of the theory of relativity and how there is a general symmetry to existence. There is also much discussion of discrete mathematics. For example, Bobby Western points out that “A point devoid of physical being leaves you with location. And a location without reference to some other location cant be expressed” (148). In other words, one thing needs another to exist. Bobby continues, saying, “There is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception” (148). In this case, there is no objective reality that exists without someone observing it. The narrator says, “There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence” (149). This idea asserts that we cannot assume that the sky, the stars, or the moon always existed. Whatever happened before the initial observation cannot be verified. Therefore, reality begins with the observer and not the thing being observed.
The nature of reality affects the human condition. Because we are faced with an indifferent universe, “Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne” (348). The nature of reality in this sense is that existence is suffering. As John Sheddan says, “A life without grief is no life at all” (140). Our reality as human beings is one in which we must suffer, a theme further explored by Miss Vivian in her visit with Alicia Western. While in the womb, human babies are immersed in total darkness. They are not aware, and they have only a vague sense of anything existing outside the womb. Miss Vivian explains:
The child’s brain the day before its birth is the same brain as the day after. But everything else is different. It probably takes them a while to accept that this thing which follows them around is them […] the newborn are probably not that quick to ascribe reality to the visual. And ascribing reality is pretty much what they’re being called upon to do (353).
Here again, reality for the child in its mother’s womb is not reality in the sense that we typically understand it. A baby does not know that it exists as it has nothing by which to measure its existence.
The Indifferent Universe
One of the novel’s primary explorations takes place through the characters of Bobby and Alicia and suggests that humanity’s place in the universe is meager and insignificant, that every civilization ultimately will vanish, and that the universe will continue to exist in the way it always has. Humanity’s insistence on bringing order to the chaos that is the universe is ultimately a futile exercise, a grasping for permanence in the face of indifference. When The Kid says, “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” (279), he’s describing the absurdity of trying to find meaning in an indifferent universe. Effectively, one can only make sense of life for oneself; no amount of scientific advancement, theology, or mysticism will change this simple fact.
The Kid also says to Alicia, “Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here” (127). The insignificance of an individual life is highlighted in this passage. This idea says that one way or the other, whether humans are here or not, the universe will continue, and that humankind really has no bearing on that. This assertion is best symbolized when Bobby stands on the beach and the waves fill in his footprints “with water one by one” (95). This is a symbol for the way human lives exist and then they don’t. Like the footprints, each generation of people gets washed away by the march of time. This eternity is represented best in the novel when, on a dive, Bobby feels the river current, “the weight of it moving over him. Endlessly, endlessly. In a sense of the relentless passing of time like nothing else” (95). The idea that time is relentless also suggests that it is a force that works against humans.
The novel examines a primary tension that occurs because humans have the capacity to consider our place in the universe. Humans can use reason and attempt to find some kind of meaning where there appears to be none. This is partly what The Kid alludes to when he talks about being only able to draw a picture of the world. Many of Bobby’s acquaintances have developed some way of reconciling their place in the universe. His grandmother Granellen and his friend Debussy both believe that at the core of it all is an intelligent design, a god of some kind. Alicia, by contrast, ultimately gave up on God and concluded that there was no meaning. For his part, Bobby seems caught in some middle ground. He is unable to find a means of making sense of the indifference of the universe from a rational point of view, and he is unable to rely solely on intuition and faith as Granellen and Debussy do.
The Legacy of Nuclear Warfare
The immediate aftermath of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II is detailed graphically in a short, but highly visual scene. Of some of the people immediately impacted, the narrator says:
They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war (116).
Bobby’s and Alicia’s father worked on the Manhattan Project and was one of the men who helped bring the atomic bomb to fruition. The creation of the bomb and the capacity of the bomb to destroy life on the planet are presented in the novel as inevitable. In other words, as humans began to learn more and the general intellectual understanding of physics increased, the development of a weapon of such power was destined to happen.
Nuclear catastrophe seems inevitable in the novel. Toward the end of the novel especially, an apocalyptic tone pervades the closing scenes. Bobby recalls the final conversation he had with his friend John prior to his death. John says, “When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy?” (377) For John, his words here reveal conviction. The earth as a cinder is a clear reference to nuclear destruction. This is not a matter of “if” but “when.” It is a foregone conclusion and it recalls the first theme of The Nature of Reality. If there is nothing left of humanity and life on the planet, who will ever know that humanity even existed?
Toward the end of the novel, Bobby considers his father's legacy. He thinks of the apocalyptic future and says to himself, “My father’s latterday petroglyphs and the people upon the road naked and howling” (382). One of McCarthy’s novels is called The Road, and it imagines a post-apocalyptic world. The people who are “naked” and “howling” recall the survivors of this earlier novel. The “petroglyphs” that Bobby mentions are the images that are left behind on brick buildings when the flash of an atomic bomb detonates. He senses that people will either end up as petroglyphs, or will survive only to suffer in the nuclear winter. The nuclear threat imposed on humanity by humanity itself establishes a tragic tone in the novel. It also is a direct legacy for Bobby and Alicia as the children of one of the scientists who helped develop the bomb. In some ways, Bobby’s and Alicia’s self-destructive tendencies are a microcosm of humanity’s self-destructive tendencies as represented by the atomic bomb.
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