Strangers On A Train

Bruno projects his aggression onto his banal yet affluent surroundings. For instance, he visualizes caviar "popping like little people, dying, each one a life" (116). His vindictive fury is almost Satanic, a connection established when he is described as "slithering" at the first meeting on the train. As the novel progresses, his Satanic temptation of Guy increases in intensity. The slow pace of Bruno's extortion over the course of these chapters instills in the reader a sense of the immense pressure building on Guy. Bruno's mania bolsters the reciprocity between the two men. Even while isolated at sea, Bruno is conscious of his proximity to Guy: "he was going farther and farther away from Guy"(117).

Bruno's attempts at blackmail are initially absurd, a pastiche of a suspense thriller: "Everything he thought of seemed either suspect or melodramatic...the letter, the map, the guy–They seemed like props in a play. […] Guy gave a short laugh when the black gun toppled out" (124). Yet Guy is strangely affected by the arrival of the gun, making himself complicit by concealing it. In Henri Bergson's famous 1900 essay, Le Rire, or The Comic, he identified certain features of the comic in general. The critical factor he identifies is inflexibility, which Bruno displays in his fixation on Guy and on murdering his father. Bergson also describes the comic as mechanical, a description that befits Bruno when he “wishes the train would go faster” (67), and Guy, in his identification with his gun: "How intelligent a jewel, he thought, and how innocent it looked now. Himself–He let it drop. The gun turned once head-over, in perfect balance, with its familiar look of willingness […]" (220). Laughter is also social, Bergson argued, and purgative, serving as a form of punishment. Highsmith's Dostoyevskian thriller enmeshes its readers all the more rigorously through its self-parody.