46 pages • 1 hour read
Cormac McCarthyThe Passenger
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
The Kid has been absent for some time during the winter and the narrator suggests that Alicia may have thought that his disappearance was for good. She returns home one night from supplemental courses at the university and finds The Kid in her room. He begins ordering her around and takes an antagonistic tone toward her. He questions her on the B that she received in religion class, and says that a B is the equivalent of failing. As The Kid and Alicia argue, a hallucination named Grogan appears and begins singing and dancing to a lewd Irish limerick. The Kid shoos away Grogan; Alicia becomes defiant toward The Kid; finally, new characters emerge who once again perform auditions. The Kid is unimpressed and sends them away as well.
Bobby meets Oiler for lunch at the bar, named the Seven Seas. They discuss the plane crash again, and that two men visited Bobby, seeking information on what he knew. Oiler mentions a job he is taking, one that involves assembling pipe underwater in Colombia. Oiler tries to get Bobby to come along, but because of the nature of the job, specifically because of how deep the water is where they will be working, Bobby declines. Oiler presses Bobby on why he is afraid of diving in deep water, which Bobby cannot really answer. Bobby leaves and returns home to discover that someone has ransacked his apartment, and he presumes that it was not the men who visited him before but someone else. He immediately begins packing his things and leaves the apartment, bringing his cat along.
He goes to the Seven Seas and asks for a room upstairs. The only available room is where a regular named Lurch recently died by suicide. After Bobby settles into his new residence, he signs on for his next job with Taylor’s, which involves pulling a sunken barge out of the river. Bobby is with a coworker named Red, heading to the jobsite. Red asks Bobby about his Maserati sports car, which leads to a discussion of Bobby’s car-racing days. They arrive at the jobsite and set off in a boat toward the place where Bobby and Red will attach a cable system to the sunken barge. After they dive into the water, they realize that visibility is near zero, even with their light sources. They effectively work in the dark, and do much of the work by feel. Since they are in a river, Bobby can feel the drag of the current. He can also feel the vibrations of a boat passing by overhead on the surface. They successfully hook up the pull system and spend the next day waiting and watching as a crane slowly pulls the sunken barge out of the river. Another coworker named Russell asks Bobby to calculate how long it will take for the barge to be pulled completely out of the river. Bobby provides an answer based on the size of the barge and the volume of water that must be drained from it.
He returns to the Seven Seas and receives a message from Janice that Debbie called. This is his friend Debussy. When Bobby calls her, she tells him of a dream she had in which Bobby was about to die while fighting a fire. She then tells him to be careful and reminds him that she also knew Alicia. When he returns to the bar the next morning, he receives a message from Lou, informing him that Oiler is dead. Bobby immediately suspects that his friend was killed by the same people who have been pursuing him, though the death was made to appear accidental.
Chapter 4 Summary
The narrative presents a flashback to when Alicia was younger and living in her paternal grandmother’s house. One night, she is awakened by an ominous figure, a beast with “reptile” feet, sitting on her windowsill. Alicia becomes scared, closes her eyes, and whispers her brother’s name. A few days later, in spring, Alicia is once again visited by The Kid, who flashes a key at her and then, magician-like, makes it disappear. When Alicia asks The Kid where the others are, he says that he is making sure things are safe for them to come out. This perplexes Alicia. Eventually, Alicia and The Kid again get into one of their arguments, this one revealing The Kid’s negative attitude and dislike toward Bobby. The Kid antagonizes Alicia, implying that she has been fooling her grandmother (her primary caretaker) as to the nature of her mental illness. The Kid implies that Alicia’s grandmother will seek the help of a medical team, which will lead to Alicia being placed in an institution. The conversation returns to Bobby and The Kid makes the salacious accusation that Alicia has incestual feelings for Bobby. He also infers that it was Bobby’s idea that she live in their grandmother’s attic, which The Kid speculates is by design to keep her protected for his own incestual reasons. Multiple times, The Kid asks Alicia if she is taking medication, which she denies. Finally, The Kid begins a short conversation on the nature of the speed of light, including a reference to Albert Einstein, whom he refers to as Alicia’s “buddy” (114).
Bobby visits a cathedral and while there, he remembers his father. Bobby considers his father’s friendship with J. Robert Oppenheimer and others who worked on the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The narrator describes the horrors experienced by those on whom the bombs were dropped, including those who managed to survive the initial blast, but were badly burned and mortally injured. Bobby also remembers his sister, Alicia, and her 18th birthday, which the pair spent together in Mexico City. The narrative then skips around, moving to 1968 when his paternal grandmother died in Akron, Ohio. Bobby meets Alicia in Akron, and she shares that their grandmother told her gold is buried beneath the basement of her former home, which had been partially demolished to make way for a road. After a full day of searching, Bobby finds a large stash of gold coins that had belonged to their grandfather. He takes two of the coins to an assessor, and receives $1000 dollars for them. He then visits another dealer and sells 12 more coins and uses the proceeds to buy a new car and a .38 revolver. After a few weeks of selling the coins while driving from Akron to Arizona, Bobby had received over $900,000. He does not sell all of the gold. Finally, he calls his sister and tells her what he discovered.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
In this section, a conversation begins that continues throughout much of the novel: the belief or disbelief in God. A range of views on the question pop up sporadically throughout the novel, and Bobby is positioned somewhere between belief and disbelief. His friend Debussy says to him, “I know you don’t believe in God. But you don’t even believe that there is a structure to the world. To a person’s life,” to which Bobby replies, “It’s just a dream” (103). For her part, Debussy insists that “it’s not just that” (103). In an earlier chapter, it’s clear that Debussy believes in God almost by default, and here she seems to plead with Bobby to believe in something. Bobby’s insistence that life is just a dream is ultimately an articulation of the way he makes sense out of existence. In Bobby’s view, life is just a dream, everything is imagined, and nothing is real; there is no such thing as objective reality. Much of how he sees life is grounded in his experience with and understanding of math and physics, specifically quantum mechanics. The influence of his father, a quantum physicist, is significant. Ultimately, the development of quantum mechanics as an area of study in the 20th century brought to the forefront questions about the nature of reality. Bobby believes no thing can exist without it being first observed, so when all observers are gone, what is left? Bobby ends up feeling as though life inherently has no meaning because, ultimately, he believes life is not real in any objective sense.
A sense of Alicia’s views on God comes through when she says, “God was not interested in our theology but only in our silence,” and, “If there was a heaven was it not founded upon the writhing bodies of the damned?” (116) Alicia asserts that God is indifferent, which mimics the novel’s theme of The Indifferent Universe. Alicia also inherently recognizes the sacrifices of the damned, which she believes refers to humanity itself. Alicia does not believe in heaven because its meaning ultimately depends on death. Heaven, in her mind, does not offer a promise or hope for life after death; instead, it serves as a reminder of humanity’s suffering.
It is clear, however, that on some level, Alicia, for all her genius, remains afraid of the unknown. At the beginning of Chapter 4, Alicia is alone in her room and thinks she sees something or someone outside her window in the night. She sees a figure with a “leather tail that slithered over its lizard feet” (105). It is an ominous vision: “Something in the shadows beyond the dormer light. Breath of the void. A blackness without name or measure. She buried her face in her hands and whispered her brother’s name” (105). Alicia’s fear shows that while she has expressed doubt in the supernatural, when she’s faced with something vaguely resembling it, she reacts viscerally and spontaneously. Fear of the void is believed to be innate to human life, as is the need for personal connection as a defense against that fear. Without Bobby’s presence in her life, she feels isolated, which further compounds her hopelessness.
Bobby’s friend Oiler speaks in a straightforward manner and the wisdom in his words is built on the simplicity of his expression. For example, Oiler says to Bobby, “You think that when there’s something that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be” (82). Oiler believes Bobby will never be able to outrun whatever it is that ails or frightens him. Oiler also believes it’s better to take on one’s fears in the present rather than pretending those fears can be brushed aside and left in the past. Oiler is warning Bobby that he must come to grips with his own past because there is ultimately no escaping it. For Bobby, this would mean accepting Alicia’s death and letting go of feeling that he is responsible for it.
While Bobby is certainly a deep thinker, Oiler’s folksy, working-class wisdom reaches Bobby differently. Characters like Oiler offer an example of how McCarthy elevates common people, who speak tersely and without decoration while revealing a surprising wisdom. In The Passenger, classically educated, book-smart types like Bobby seem lacking in such wisdom and, instead, appear sorrowfully and even painfully lost in the complexities of existence.
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