The Passenger

“I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost.” (376) 

McCarthy’s prose is poetry that acknowledges the evil in the world and inside each of us. The darkness, the despair, the fall, the pain and the loneliness. Written and uttered in a paradoxical minimalistic way that for me is very personal and intimate. McCarthy’s language is my language. And yet, inside this darkness/the Shadow, there is also light, there is also goodness – in all of us, in the simple human beings. Besides all of these, The Passenger is perhaps McCarthy’s last novel (if we see it and Stella Maris as a whole), a mature and challenging novel about friendship, family relationships and forgiveness, modern issues of the world, literature and philosophy, and why not, physics. And of course, what remains at the end of a day/of a life.  

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“His father. Who had created out of the absolute dust of earth an evil sun by whose light men saw like some hideous adumbration of their own ends through cloth and flesh the bones in one another’s bodies.” (368)

“Let’s just turn out the lights and call it a life.” (16)

“There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust.” (115-116)

“You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. 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. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet.” (128)

“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. You may be wrong, but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life. You may call it one. But it wont be one.” (174)

“I think I would have found my life pretty funny if I hadn’t had to live it.” (293)

“I believe in the reality of the world. The harder and the sharper the edges the more you believe. The world is here. It is not someplace else. I dont believe in traveling about. I believe that the dead are in the ground. I suppose at one time I was like old Pau. I waited to hear from God and I never did. Yet he remained a believer and I did not.” (380)