Strangers On A Train

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1950

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Symbols & Motifs

Train Tracks and Teleology

In this runaway train of a crime novel, the struggle for prominence between the two protagonists accelerates the plot. As discussed in the analysis of Chapters 4-8, the symbolic train also has a dual function in Emile Zola's 1890 La Bête Humaine. A linear mode of transportation with a predestined terminus, the train is both a metaphor for the repressed drives of the novel's protagonists, and a symbol of the novel itself. Highsmith's novel can be called a classic because it transcends the parameters of a suspense thriller by contending with the anxieties inherent in the novelistic form and its contemporary moment.

Compare the figure of the out-of-control horse and trap that carries the protagonist in Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess is an especially clear example of how the downfall of the principal character is driven by the novelistic form itself, the subject subjected to its narrative demands. Both Tess’s and Guy's fatal flaws predestine their downfall: "Bruno seemed incapable of surprise (25); "[t]he aggressive thrust of the train" (67); "[i]f he could derail himself from the night's tracks and set himself on the day's" (136); "Guy did not stop him, because he knew he was going to enter the house and it would all come true […]he felt he moved on certain definite train tracks now" (146); “[i]n himself, the second horse of the charioteer had always been obedient as the first” (180). If novels chart a fall, novel writing is inherently bound up with sin, a potentially nefarious business. Highsmith's self-conscious conflation of novelistic and criminal plotting in her book Plotting Suspense Fiction posits fiction writing as a potentially antisocial practice.

Mirrors, Doubles and Double Lives

The narrative of Strangers on a Train is both constructed through and concerned with duplicity. Guy refers to the "hypocrisy" at the heart of social life as "torture," and as early as Chapter 1, Bruno looks at himself in the mirror "in an agony of self-torture." As he tells Anne in Chapter 44, duality is a source of both antagonism and pain:

I was just thinking of what Guy always says, about the doubleness of everything. You know, the positive and negative, side by side […] There's also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush (250).

The schism that divides Guy's psyche isolates him from society and opens the door for Bruno, the threatening manifestation of his own dark side. The two protagonists reflect each other, and despite Guy's resistance to the connection, the duo increasingly identify with one another: "The bond between Guy and him now was closer than brotherhood" (107). Through the murders, Guy merges with his "secret brother," and he increasingly internalizes his guilt and seeks self-destruction: "He wanted to throw his fist at the chin in the mirror" (140).

Diagnosed with insanity, homosexuals were still being “treated” with “cures” ranging from lobotomies to castration during Highsmith’s life. As a lesbian, Highsmith knew well the double life led by homosexuals in such an oppressive society. The homosexual dynamic between the two protagonists is suffused with danger and guilt. Yet it seems that Highsmith herself was ready to entertain that danger. She had a lesbian affair with the psychoanalyst she was seeing in an attempt to “cure” her homosexuality. The psychoanalyst, Kathryn Hamil Cohen, was married to Dennis Cohen, who later published Strangers on a Train.

Marriage

Alienation preponderates in the novel. The paradigm of the novel—two strangers exchanging murder alibis—is alienation taken to its logical extreme. Yet this radically antisocial act, shared by two strangers, produces a marriage-like contract, and the closest relationship in the novel. Two years before Highsmith published her novel, Tennessee Williams lodged Blanche DuBois' famed axiom about strangers in the public consciousness in A Streetcar Named Desire. The phrase articulates the inherent dangers of relying upon the veneer of civilization and its often-damaging effects on the psyche, ideas shared with Strangers on a Train.

The relation between Guy and Bruno follows the path of a tragic love story in that their passions draw them into conflict with society. Societally-inscribed love is the opposite of this liberation: "Something that had always been and always would be. Bruno, himself, Anne. And the moving on the tracks. And the lifetime of moving on the tracks until death do us part, for that was the punishment." (193).

The novel explores notions of the bond between man and wife, and the bond between brothers. As Bruno tightens his claustrophobic hold on Guy, he gives him a gift of neck ties, a sign of the bond that ties them together. Emotional ties are almost universally problematic in the novel. Even Guy's altruistic relationship with Anne serves to enmesh him further. "It was only a month until their marriage now […] What right had he to imprison her with himself?" (184). The novel challenges the notion of marriage as a societally-inscribed sign of intimacy: "He didn't want another three-minute wedding with a stranger for a witness" (127). It asks us to countenance the inevitable strangeness, broached by language, that persists even in our most intimate relationships.