Strangers On A Train

Like many of the happy moments in the novel, Guy's Mexican stay with Anne has a discomfortingly saccharine flavor. Guy sleeps on a "bed like a fallen cake" (56). Pink is everywhere, from his room in the Montecarlo "crammed" with pink furniture, to the "big pink sign on the top of a building: TOME XX" (53). Contrasted with the "masculine gloom" (55) Guy likes in the hotel, the preponderance of pink suggests that the feminine world alienates Guy. Guy finds the women in his life as inscrutable as the sign, as we see in his estrangement from Miriam, Anne and his mother. Later chapters reveal that he has never kept close contact with friends, either. In a novel about strangeness, Guy's isolation is thus already palpable in Chapter 9.

If the narrative is infused with Guy's stream of consciousness, Guy’s dreamlike Mexican vacation with Anne reveals a lot about his unconscious. The “sign” mentioned by Bruno in the previous chapter resurfaces subtly here in the word "tome," which also means “codex,” a book of signs. Like his own repressed desires, the sign is quite literally unintelligible to Guy, who cannot read Spanish. His inability to read the sign indicates that Guy is likewise blind to own unconscious programming. A cloying inevitability hampers his actions in the novel, which seem scripted, his freedom blighted. In 1949, a year before Highsmith published her novel, Joseph Campbell published The Hero's Journey. Based in New York like Guy himself, the literature professor attempts to draw a universal template for the hero's journey, a little like Guy's beloved Platonic Forms do for human ethics.