The Passenger

“Where there’s no linear there’s no delineation.”

The Thalidomide Kid says this to Alicia Western about plotlines and narrative structures; without a recognizable linear structure where there is a beginning, middle, and end, then by consequence, there is no precision.

“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.