Strangers On A Train

“How boring it was really, Guy thought, crime. How motiveless often. A certain type turned to crime. And who would know from Bruno’s hands, or his room, or his ugly wistful face that he had stolen?” 

Early in the novel, Highsmith introduces a theme consistent with several of her other novels, which is to question the notion that "other" people commit serious crimes. Highsmith shows that it is the fragility of civility that accounts for the tenacity with which society holds this belief. Her principle character bears a name that stands in for society at large, subverting the typical modernist focus on the primacy of individual perspective.

"The stranger on the train who would listen, commiserate, and forget."

A key quotation in a novel about strangers, Guy's assumption echoes another rule of polite social relations: disinterest. In Chapter 1, as in the final chapter with Owen Markham, Guy solicits the therapeutic ear of a stranger. In both contexts, these recall the analyst's consulting room. The dangers of listening are revealed when the train carriage and hotel room become scenes for the dramatization of Guy's soul. Consequently, Guy finds Bruno's room to be a "little hell."

“‘I may have had fleeting ideas, but I’d never have done anything about them. I’m not that kind of person.’

‘That’s exactly where you’re wrong! Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far–and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know.’” 

This quotation establishes Bruno's personality as essentially sociopathic. By asserting that "anyone can murder," he is talking about himself. This quotation is also revelatory of the dangerous power of the word in Highsmith. Although the difference between the personalities of the antisocial Bruno and Guy, with his proactive conscience, is manifest, once Bruno has pronounced this, it is almost inevitable that he will act it out. In Biblical fashion, words have an oracular function in the novel. They are what Bruno uses to pressure Guy into killing his father, and what convict him, too. Puns in the novel often articulate the shocking proximity of words and deeds. The question of the extent to which words constitute reality is always moot in Highsmith, as it is in modernist literature. Ezra Pound wrote in the ABC of Reading (1934): "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."

“‘I like you a lot Guy.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you're a good guy. Decent, I mean. I meet a lot of guys–no pun–but not many like you. I admire you.’

In this entertaining moment, Highsmith pokes fun at the notion of the binary good guy versus bad guy conception. Guy is shown over the course of the novel to be capable of murder. However, as usual in the novel, linguistic agility denotes a character's sense of power. The attraction of the pun is such that Highsmith is willing to risk the reader's suspension of disbelief for a moment. The force of this impulse mimics Bruno's own attraction to Guy, while the shock it gives the reader implicates the reader in the narrative in just the same way that Bruno colonizes Guy's life.

“A sense of purpose, strange and sweet to him, carried him along in an irresistible current.”

The characters in Strangers on a Train are invariably travelling. Despite the unravelling of the pair and the dramatic suspense this creates, several chapters pass with a sense of banal, apathetic lassitude. Although the characters travel primarily for pleasure, this is accompanied by a sense of purposelessness and futility. Whether it be the languorousness with which Guy and Miriam pursue their divorce, or Bruno's boredom, the characters suffer from a lack of impetus that seems paradoxical in a suspense thriller.

"Just like the strain...of a haunting refrain." 

The merry-go-round scene that became such a focal point in Hitchcock's film adaptation echoes Anne's theory on Page 52 that "People don't grow emotionally." Unresolved problems resurface just as the merry-go-round spins ceaselessly. The motif undermines the idea of technological progress that must have been appealing after the Second World War. 

"The Palmyra was going to be as perfect as his original conception, and Guy had never created anything before that he felt would be perfect." 

Guy's ambition to build a perfect building shows his ambition to attain an idealized perfection. This is underscored elsewhere, when he imagines building a bridge "like an angel's wing." Guy's ambition aligns him with Dr. Faustus, Dr. Jekyll and Dostoyevsky's troubled Ubermensch Raskolnikov, all of whom seek to play God.

"No, he did not therefore conclude that his pleasure had partaken of the sexual."

Blood lust is related to actual lust in the novel. Immediately after the murder, Bruno realizes "he had never wanted a woman more than ever before in his life." What's more, the murder takes place in what Bruno describes as "a neckers' paradise." He wonders minutes before the murder whether "Miriam would be at it again tonight." Bruno hunts Miriam, seeking to exert his power over her. There is also considerable evidence that Bruno is attracted to Guy. He feels resentful that "Guy spent his time with a girl" (119). Later, Bruno thinks that "[i]f he could strangle Anne too, then Guy and he could really be together" (250). Described as a "frustrated […] habitually unrequited lover" (58), Bruno is unable to love, and instead kills to gain intimacy with Guy. 

"The monomaniacal intensity with which Bruno stared at him now...he stared at Bruno's fixed, still wistful eyes, fascinated by their cool insanity."

The question of sanity arises at several points in the novel. Guy reflects "the day he had last seen Bruno, in the restaurant, seemed a day of madness. Surely he must have been going insane" (210). Guy is increasingly incapacitated by Bruno's Medusa-like fixation on him. 

"No, he didn't want another three-minute wedding with a stranger for a witness."

When Guy muses on his previous marriage contract, he uses the word "witness." Taken from the legal register, his choice draws a parallel between marriage and murder. The quote highlights the strangeness (a central concern of the novel) of the wedding contract, which takes "three minutes" to make and lasts a lifetime. There is a parallel between Guy's marriages and the blood pact between he and his "brother," Bruno.

"Who would believe such a story if he told it? Who would accept such fantasy? The letter, the map, the gun–they seemed like props of a play, objects arranged to give a verisimilitude to a story that wasn’t real and never could be real. Guy burnt the letter. He burnt all the letters he had, then hurried to get ready for Long Island." 

Highsmith's novel here undermines its own seriousness, only to draw the reader all the more strongly into its weightier concerns. The reader inevitably feels uneasy, conscious that the novel's self-referential, comedic surface is a dissimulation, beneath which lies a robust challenge to our delusions. The reader is shown the results of Guy's underestimation of Bruno, and Bruno's of Gerard. Appearances certainly do not constitute reality in Highsmith's novel.

"If Bruno distorted only slightly their conversation on the train, couldn’t it amount to an agreement between murderers? The hours in Bruno’s compartment, that tiny hell, came back suddenly very clearly."

In many ways, the meeting on the train acts like an infernal pact. In Christopher Marlowe's play, Dr. Faustus, the interiority of hell is emphasized: "where we are is hell." The protagonist signs away his soul in exchange for worldly success, much as Guy does. When Marlowe was murdered in a drunken fight, William Shakespeare described the event as "a great reckoning in a little room," a phrase that has become idiomatic.

“It was not murder but an act he performed to rid himself of Bruno, the slice of a knife that cut away a malignant growth.”

Establishing Guy and Bruno as a single psychic entity, this quotation posits Guy as the Dr. Jekyll character, increasingly possessed by his Mr. Hyde. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is another text about the strangeness of our interior selves, in relation to civil society. In Stevenson's novella, the malignant personality is also brought on through an addiction to drink, but perceived of as a brother.

"Hadn’t he sensed it time and time again, and like a coward never admitted it? Hadn’t he known Bruno was like himself? Or why had he liked Bruno? He loved Bruno. Bruno had prepared every inch of the way for him, and everything would go well because everything always went well for Bruno. The world was geared for people like Bruno." 

The use of the word "geared" in this citation hints at burgeoning American industry post war, and an absence of compassion associated with this mechanical productivity. America initially benefitted economically from the war by producing weaponry for European forces. The prosperity enjoyed by white Americans in the 1950s also came at the expense of African-Americans. The nascent Civil Rights Movement did not gain legislation until the 1960s. The 50s also produced the muscle car, which integrated technologies whose development was catalyzed by the war. Apparent progress came with a price. Guy, in his Everyman function, appears to be acknowledging his complicity in a system that privileges him while oppressing and harming others.

"Society’s law was lax compared to the law of conscience. He might go to the law and confess, but confession seemed a minor point, a mere gesture, even an easy way out, an avoidance of truth. If the law executed him, it would be a mere gesture."

Ultimately, it is not external forces that result in Guy's confession but the punitive force of his own superego, the potency of his guilty conscience. In this sense, Guy is the opposite of Camus's Meursault, who is convicted not because he commits murder but because he fails to show the remorse that society expects from him. The cathartic satisfaction of Guy's ultimate confession of guilt may be read as offering a critique of existentialist philosophy. In an interview, Highsmith emphasized that the existentialist ideas in the novel were voiced by a psychopath.

"Bruno had always been able to read him." 

Legibility is critical in Strangers on a Train. While Guy's motivation is often inscrutable to him and his social circle, Bruno is able to discern his darker side, and Detective Gerard his crippling guilt. The plot is based on an attempt at illegibility by erasing murder motives through the swap. Bruno is the architect of Guy's destiny, and in sending him plans, he seems able to speak Guy's language. After all, Guy's professional life is spent drawing up architectural plans. Where Guy is an architect of the future, Bruno appears destructive and atavistic by contrast.

"[…] he had wanted to murder her lover Steve. So he had believed even on the train, reading his Plato. In himself, the second horse of the charioteer had always been obedient as the first. But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil."

The figure of the chariot speaks to the titular train ride that this novel takes through human psychology. Plato writes in the Phaedrus: "Let us then liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer." The “good” horse contends with its opposite, so that: "chariot driving in our case is inevitably a painfully difficult business." Sigmund Freud also used the metaphor of the chariot in his 1932 “Dissection of the Psychical Personality”: "The ego's relation to the id might be compared to that of a rider to his horse […] only too often there arises the not-precisely-ideal situation of the rider being obliged to guide the horse along the path by which it itself wants to go."

"But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it." 

Guy's theory centers on strangeness. The interplay of binary polarities structures his world. At this stage in the novel, Guy has already sealed his own downfall. Having alienated himself from society through murder, Guy behaves like Camus' hero in The Stranger.

“And the moving on the tracks. And the lifetime of moving on the tracks until death do us part, for that was the punishment. What more punishment was he looking for?"

Guy expresses in this citation his fear that his guilt will dog him throughout his married life with Anne. Read in his Everyman guise, Guy also articulates a malaise that besets civilized life in general. Guy aligns himself here with the absurd man, who experiences existence as essentially meaningless.

“[…] arrogance, perhaps, to believe so in one’s destiny. But, on the other hand, who could be more genuinely humble than one who felt compelled to obey the laws of his own fate?"

In this citation, Guy contemplations revolve around the notion of hubris. Defined as 'exaggerated pride or confidence', a character's hubris is the fatal flaw that causes their downfall. Guy, with his tendency toward idealization and identification with moral virtue certainly fits this motif. The question of fate is at the heart of Sophocles' famous play Oedipus Rex, in which the king (Oedipus) mocks the blind prophet Tiresias, before his prophecy is realized and the king falls. Guy hopes to exculpate himself by accepting his fate. No matter his social standing, just like Oedipus and Meursault, his is a "blind man's route" (Sartre, L'Explication de L'Etranger).

“Himself—he let it drop.”  

At several points in the narrative, Guy aligns himself with the revolver with which he commits the murder and bought in his youth. Guy identifies with the wild west outlaw. He appreciates the weapon for its "beauty." Innocent in itself, the gun is nonetheless primed to be used for destructive ends.

“You don't seem to realize the caliber of the person you're talking about.' 

‘The only caliber ever worth considering is the gun’s, Charles.’”

One of the novel's most potent puns is wielded by an increasingly omniscient Detective Gerard. While Bruno attempts to obfuscate through his appeal to social standing, Gerard retorts with fact. Philosophically, Bruno's postmodern critical theory does battle with Gerard's utilitarianism. Gerard's linguistic control over Bruno bespeaks his power over him more generally. Gerard's sensitivity to ambivalence reveals that he is just the person to unravel Bruno's "perfect murder" with his "twin track mind."

“How else could one really explain in mankind the continued toleration of wars, the perennial enthusiasm for wars when they came, if not for some primal pleasure in killing?” 

Highsmith's crime novel becomes a foil for an exploration of larger societal concerns, like the previous two World Wars. Guy's musings fall just prior to the revelation that Gerard is able to convict he and Bruno for their crimes. Guy's culpability, and with it the common man's complicity in war, are in question. In this sense, both Guy and the reader are under investigation.