Strangers On A Train

"A young man with two lives" (103), Bruno's name bespeaks division. There is a subtle echo of Shakespeare's most famous of rhetorical antagonists, Marc Anthony and Brutus, in Bruno's full name. That Marc Anthony's most famous speech "Friends, Romans, countrymen" opens with the word "friends" seems apposite, given that Bruno's questionable friendship with Guy structures the novel. Perhaps nowhere in literature is the word "friend" so problematic as it is in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Guy's "train friend" (47) is the opposite of Guy, their meeting a moment or pivot between two apparently divergent life paths. 

There is considerable evidence in the novel that Guy and Bruno in fact function as reciprocal fragments of a single personality. In Sigmund Freud's conceptualization of the complete human psyche, Bruno may be likened to the Id: the uncontrollable, instinctual counterpart to Guy's superego-like personality. Bruno is the Mr. Hyde to Guy's Dr. Jekyll: "All he despised, Guy thought, Bruno represented. All the things he would not want to be, Bruno was, or would become" (33); "And Bruno, he and Bruno. Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self" (180). Almost comically Oedipal, Bruno, at twenty-five, is younger than Guy, and looks up to Guy while hating his own father. Bruno’s Oedipal resentment of his father, which is also directed towards women, Guy observes, "seem[s] the key to his whole personality" (27).

Bruno likens he and Guy to gods on several occasions, and appears, in the first part of the novel, to have godlike power and perspective: "the world was geared for people like Bruno" (148). He is fickle, impetuous and murderous. Bruno's Bacchanalian spirit is signified by his drunkenness and hedonistic desire for "everything there is. Wine, women, and song" (21).Bruno treats other characters (the taxi driver, the investigator), as though they are beneath him, and enjoys a godlike level of economic privilege. Bruno sails on board The Fairy Prince, contemplating patricide in bathetic parallel with both Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. His volatility is signified in Chapter 1 by the description of the boil that erupts volcanically from his forehead: "It's everything I hate boiling up in me" (21). At the moment in which Guy kills Bruno’s father, the gun makes a sound "as if the crust of the world burst" (153). This volcanic eruption stems from the depths of Bruno's psyche, and his forehead.

Miriam Joyce’s internal world is never revealed. Instead she is an object approached through the subjective experiences of the two protagonists: "Miriam had become an object, small and hard" (72); "[h]ow sure he had once been that he possessed her" (38). Despite her manipulative hold on Guy, Miriam is a pawn in the novel. Bruno hunts her as though she were an animal, as helpless a victim as the bird he clutches at the amusement park, just before strangling her: "he released the swallow-tailed bird he had been fingering in the balloon seller's box" (75).

Much like Bruno, Miriam functions as a facet of Guy's personality, one which he disowns and disavows, but seems nonetheless inescapably drawn to. Miriam is Guy's tragic flaw:

"There had always been inside him, like a flaw in a jewel, not visible on the surface, a fear and anticipation of failure that he had never been able to mend. At times, failure was a possibility that fascinated him […] he was with Miriam now, the symbol of the failure of his youth" (41).

It is no surprise then that Guy is calmed by distancing himself from Miriam: "Strange how remote–perhaps how foreign–Miriam seemed five minutes after talking with her, how unimportant, really, everything seemed" (42).

Guy's aggression toward Miriam arises from the feeling of impotence she inspires in him. Her power over him is so strong because he continues to wrestle with the part of himself that she represents: "She's everything that should be loathed...no decency, no conscience" (52). Guy is trapped by his disavowal of his sinful side, his own "malice" (42), as we see when he conceals his vengeful impulses from Bruno on the train in Chapter 2. Due to the fact that it is his sinful nature with which the novel reckons, Miriam can be seen as an analogue of Eve, disrupting the paradise of his life with Anne by tempting him with the forbidden fruit of sin. Miriam is also a symbolic red-letter woman, a red-headed adulteress; she echoes Hester Prynne, who is branded as such in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: "[her] red socks with the red sandals irritated him" (74).

If Miriam is a caricature or “type” of woman, Anne is a Platonic Form. While Miriam is the embodiment of Guy's tragic flaw, his fear of failure, Anne appears flawless. Despite this idealization, Guy also objectifies Anne: "He thought of his love, like a rich possession" (147). Although Anne makes efforts to share Guy's world, her subjectivity is as remote from his as Miriam's. We see this, for instance, in Chapter 5, when Anne's telegram soliciting communication from Guy interrupts the narrative discordantly, creating a sense of alienation: "Whatever happens, tell me and let's face it. I often feel you don't. Face things, I mean" (44). 

If Bruno represents Guy's repressed aggressive drive, Anne is as unattainable as Guy's ideals. Guy describes Anne as being "as beautiful as a white bridge" (191), yet he is unable to realize what would be his "crowning achievement": the bridge he plans with Bob Treacher, or a life with Anne. Both are castles in the air. Described elsewhere by Guy as a "Dea Ex Machina," Anne's elevated social standing and moral purity align her with Gerard as the face of the Law in the novel. Anne may not be the police when she calls on Guy in Chapter 24, but she represents his internal police, his punishing Superego self: "Society's law was lax compared to the law of conscience" (178). Figured as such, Guy's guilt leads him to run from her. 

Yet Anne resists Guy's idealization of her, often urging him towards a more integrated outlook. She says in Chapter 9, "Oh Guy! If you'd only grow up!" (53), and gazes down at him like a "mother" in Chapter 35. Where Guy struggles to be authentic, Anne is as natural as Mother Nature. Anne is associated with Guy's youth, love, and the optimism of spring. If Miriam is the temptress, Anne is often an Eden, a haven, for Guy. The couple walk together like Adam and Eve through gardens on multiple occasions in the novel. Even Anne's intuition that Bruno might have killed Miriam crosses her mind "like a dry leaf blown by the wind" (250).