45 pages • 1 hour read
Strangers On A Train
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Strangers and Existentialism
Eighteenth-century novels like Gulliver's Travels typically parachute an outsider into a society that they struggle to understand. When Albert Camus wrote The Stranger in 1942, his protagonist expounds from this rational dissociation from the world a theory pertaining to existence itself. As a consequence of his reason, man is at odds not only with his fellow man, but with the entire world. "The stranger is man confronting the world," wrote Sartre in his exegesis of The Stranger, Explication de L'Etranger.
“Existentialism is self-indulgent,” Highsmith opined in an interview with Diana Cooper-Clark. Yet the murders in her novel are framed by existentialism: "Only the mysterious fact of the thing remained, the mystery and the miracle of stopping life" (106). Camus's Meursault and Highsmith's protagonists follow an Oedipal path forged by their preoccupation with the absurdity of human life: "It was all false and didn't exist" (152).
Conflict and Capitalism
Initially resisting involvement in World War II, the Roosevelt administration sought to assume the role of the "arsenal of democracy," selling weapons to Europe. Money in Highsmith's novel is blood money. Guy muses early in the novel: "the desperate boredom of the wealthy […] It tended to destroy rather than create. And it could lead to crime just as easily as privation" (22). Bruno aligns wealth with war when he asks Guy during their initial conversation on the train, "Didn't you ever feel you wanted to steal something? Or kill somebody?" (27). At the moment of pulling the trigger, Guy tries to convince himself that his murder is "like killing in a war" (152). A shade of cynicism dogs the characters' pleasurable pastimes. This is most notable in the crazed moment in which a drunken Bruno rides the merry-go-round with his target, Miriam, so memorably adapted in Hitchcock's 1951 film. In a world in which technological advancement and productivity came at the cost of world war, the late 1940s must have seemed equally disorientating.
Failing to live out the ethical system espoused in his book on Plato, Guy is also unable to share the subjective world of the people around him. Instead, he situates them within a capitalist universe, continually likening them to objects. Anne is "a rich possession," for instance (147). His approach is reminiscent of American international politics during the war years. Guy's prestigious Palmyra commission is important because it has wealthy investors, and Bruno's inheritance is his only source of meaning: "Now that he owned the grass and the trees, it meant something"(168). The murders, intended as acts of radical freedom, are in fact a nihilistic response to an apparently closed capitalist system. The novel raises questions about the ultimate terminus of capitalist production that are still relevant today:
Subjectivity at Sea: Literary Modernism
Though the eponymous train is a prominent vehicle for the novel, another voyage takes place. Increasingly, the characters are literally and personally at sea. Storytelling and spiritual questing have been linked with sea travel since Homer's seminal narrative The Odyssey. In greater proximity to Highsmith's novel is the seminal modernist text, James Joyce's Ulysses. This tome has become a symbol of modernist aesthetics that privileged subjective experience. Readers of modernist literature are plunged into the internal world of protagonists through a fluid writing style commonly called “stream of consciousness.” Although not itself a Modernist text, Highsmith’s novel is flooded—via Bruno's alcohol and privilege-fueled solipsism—with the ethical problem inherent in modernism: that individual subjectivity can veer dangerously towards misanthropy.
Pleasure boating in Long Island in 1949 was belied by upsetting memories of war. When Bruno drowns, a clear parallel is drawn between consciousness and the ocean. Bruno, a figure of Guy's unconscious, is now gone: "there seemed nothing but a silent grey vacuum filling all space, in which he was only a tiny point of consciousness" (263). In an analogue with Ulysses' Charybdis, suppressed memories well up in Guy's own interior world:
[…] a sensation as of a tiny whirlpool inside him began to confuse him. Tiny, but realer than the memories somehow, because he had uttered it. Pride? Hatred? Or merely impatience with himself, because all that he kept feeling now was so useless? He turned the conversation from himself (28).
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