Strangers On A Train

In the novel's Faustian denouement, Guy's conscience brings about his capture by Gerard. Before Guy realizes that Gerard has overheard his confession, he seeks to confess his guilt: "I'm as good as dead now, because I'm going to give myself up" (273); "I'm not going free. I'm not free. I did this in cold blood" (274). The confessional conclusion of Highsmith's work echoes that of Thomas Mann's 1947 novel, Dr. Faustus, in which the central character, Aidan, confesses the truth of his infernal pact to the audience who come to hear his music. In much the same way, Guy scribes his story on sheets of paper that he usually uses for his architectural drawings, "blackening" their whiteness with his confession of sin. 

It is at this point that Guy's defenses collapse with the weight of his guilt: "It was like a fortress falling, like a great building falling apart in his mind, but it crumbled like powder and fell silently" (280). Unlike his buildings, Guy's character has proved malleable. What started in the "little hell" of Bruno's train carriage finds fulfilment as a "fortress." In overhearing Guy's confession, Gerard functions as analyst, secular priest, and the symbolic face of the Law. Gerard's attentive ear bridges the schism with society created by Guy's guilt, swallowing the narrative before Guy is able to build the literal bridge he is planning with Bob Treacher. Though Guy finds relief in at last encountering a member of society able to countenance his hypocrisy as an individual, it is unclear at the end of the novel to what extent Gerard will enforce punishment for Guy’s crime.

In Guy's written confession, there is an analogue with novel writing, which is typically represented as amoral (if not immoral) in Highsmith's novel. It is from reading detective stories that Bruno first gets the idea for the murders. In his Bardic relation of the tale to Owen, Guy entertains the "horrible" thought that he could ensnare Miriam's lover in the same way that Bruno did him (270). As soon as Bruno dies, Guy seeks out another conspiratorial brother in Owen Markman. There is an equivalence in these scotch-fueled conspiratorial and confessional meetings between the two pairs of men. One notable difference is the present of a third, Gerard, in the second instance. Gerard's capacity to fathom hypocrisy, his "twin track mind," finally derails the runaway train of Guy's secret life.

Highsmith's narrative is morally ambivalent, challenging its readers with complicity as insistently as Bruno does Guy. As a witness to the tale and a member of society, the reader is figured either as the attentive Gerard or the inattentive Owen. Murder is a microcosm for broader concerns when Guy ponders: "how else could one really explain in mankind the continued toleration of wars" (242). Highsmith could almost be addressing the reader directly when Guy tells Owen:

Given the same circumstances, I could break you down and make you kill someone. It might take different methods from the ones Bruno used on me, but it could be done. What else do you think keeps the totalitarian states going? Or do you ever stop to wonder about things like that, Owen? (276).

Bruno proved to Guy that, contrary to his belief in his own moral inviolability, "anyone can murder." At the end of the novel, the reader could almost be Guy, innocently reading his novel on the train in Chapter 1.