The Pilot's Wife

“It was the act of leaving itself, of Jack’s removing himself from the house, that had always been difficult. She often felt, watching him walk out of the door with his thick, boxy flight bag in one hand and his overnight bag in the other, his uniform cap tucked under his arm, that he was, in some profound way, separating from her.”

In her memories, Kathryn’s sense of Jack as separate is persistent but vague. On some level, she understands that they are distant, or rather that Jack is withdrawing from her. Yet Kathryn insists at the beginning of the book, despite her own intuition and mounting evidence, that nothing was wrong with their relationship. This passage shows that Kathryn at the least subconsciously realized Jack’s distance, and plants the seeds for the discovery of Jack’s second family.

“And she thought then how strange it was that disaster—the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face—could be, at times, such a thing of beauty.”

Kathryn is struggling to understand her own response to Jack’s death and the plane crash. She imagines, as a man describes it on television, the sight of the crash over the ocean. The abstract images he describes surprise her with their aesthetic beauty, despite their horror.

The above quote uses polysyndeton, where words are separated by conjunctions, in this case “and:” “the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face” (bold guide’s emphasis). Polysyndeton in this case mimics the breathlessness and urgency of Kathryn’s crisis.