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 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
The Kid visits Alicia after she has visited her doctor. He asks if the doctor was inappropriate with her. The doctor prescribed for her anti-psychotic medication, which she took for a couple of days before deciding to dispose of the medicine due to her concerns about side effects. The narrative in this section jumps around and there are multiple interactions with The Kid. Alicia’s brother, Bobby, also visits and she goes out to various places with him. During one meeting with The Kid, Alicia calls him a “dwarf,” and then immediately apologizes. Her tone toward The Kid is much more assertive than before, and she even is often dismissive of him. Toward the end of this section, Alicia describes herself as having schizophrenia. She visits a hospital and elects to undergo electric shock therapy. When she begins to wake up and is recovering from the procedure, she is visited by The Kid and others in his gang, who are all covered in ash and soot apparently because they were partially burned by the electric shock.
The narrative shifts to a dinner Bobby has with his friend John Sheddan, an eccentric character with a penchant for fine wine and criminal activity, particularly illegally selling prescription drugs. The men are in Knoxville, Tennessee, and John does much of the talking, revealing his cynical and condescending worldview. Bobby then meets with someone named Asher. They discuss Bobby’s father, and this time Bobby does most of the talking. He describes various principles and theories of physics, including bootstrap theory, quantum physics, and string theory. The discussion reveals the extent of Bobby’s physics knowledge, and that his father was not an ordinary physicist, but one who worked with some of the greatest minds of modern times, including Einstein and Oppenheimer. Bobby tells Asher that after his father died, he himself gave up on physics, noting that he was not exceptional at it like his father was.
The narrative shifts again, and Bobby is in New Orleans. He picks up his Maserati from its storage and travels to Tennessee to visit his maternal grandmother, completing the 600-mile trip in just under six hours. When Bobby arrives at his grandmother Granellen’s home, he learns that she has been looking after his uncle, Royal, whose mental faculties soon appear to be impacted. Multiple conversations between Bobby and Granellen take place. During one, Bobby accuses Granellen of believing that Alicia is in hell. Bobby spends a few days with his grandmother, pondering how his mother met his father, that they both died from cancer, and that they had much different outlooks on religion and the meaning of life. There also is a further sense of the love that existed between Bobby and Alicia; there are hints that this love reached beyond typical sibling affection, but incest is not explicitly revealed. Instead, the possibility is an undercurrent, one that Granellen seems aware of. Bobby leaves Granellen’s home and drives back to New Orleans. He takes the letters that Alicia wrote him while she was alive, and when he finally gets back to his apartment, he reads them. He hides the letters behind the bathroom vanity mirror so that any intruder will not discover them.
Chapter 6 Summary
Alicia is in her attic bedroom of her paternal grandmother’s house in Ohio. The Kid is there with another man by the name of Walter who is at work setting up an old-fashioned movie projector. The Kid reveals a roll of film and the projector begins showing grainy images of Alicia’s distant relatives. It then shows her mother, who it turns out is pregnant with Alicia. The images also move from her parents’ home in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to a time in her youth when they lived in Tennessee. Alicia becomes upset and demands that The Kid stop the film. The footage showcases how Alicia’s parents went from poverty to worldwide recognition in just two generations. She argues back and forth with The Kid until finally she asks to see more of the footage.
The narrative shifts back to Bobby’s story and briefly describes his experience racing Formula One cars in Europe. He lived in Paris in the late 1960s and while he was there, Alicia visited. Eventually, once the Formula One racing season was over, he was offered to join a racing team for a Formula Two circuit. The narrative shifts back to the present of 1980. Because Bobby was away at his grandmother’s he lost a few opportunities on jobs for Taylor’s. Lou, the dispatcher, offers Bobby a contact for a company that is working out of Pensacola, Florida. Two other co-workers warn Bobby against pursuing the job. Bobby does not heed the advice and in the next sequence, he is being flown by helicopter to the oil rig from where he will be diving out in the Gulf of Mexico. When he is dropped off, it seems that he’s the only one on the rig. He tries to make himself at home, cooking for himself at the mess and keeping busy by reading and playing pool. A storm is raging, and as time passes, Bobby begins to feel paranoia. He is on the rig a full day before he starts to wonder if he has been set up by the shadowy men who visited him before. He wonders if they prepared this for him and if they will eventually kill him while he’s alone on the rig. On the second day, the crew returns, though Bobby’s team of divers and the boat are nowhere to be seen. This suggests that perhaps they were out in the storm and did not survive. Bobby does nothing other than listen to the activity on the rig.
The narrative shifts again, and Bobby has returned to New Orleans. When he gets to the bar below his apartment, Janice notifies him that someone had broken in. Unfortunately, Billy Ray, his cat, is nowhere to be found. Janice asks Bobby who the men are who are searching for him, and Bobby says he doesn’t know. He doesn’t find Billy Ray, either. The next day, two men are waiting for Bobby downstairs in the bar. They ask him to look over some photographs, and in one of them, he sees his father. He claims that he doesn’t know anyone else in the photographs. The men do not disclose the purpose for their questions, and it remains a mystery. After this encounter, Bobby seeks out the services of a private investigator named Kline who asks him about the mysterious circumstances of discovering the crashed underwater plane. Ultimately, Kline advises that Bobby should run, and he offers to help Bobby by creating a false identity for him. In the final section of the chapter, Bobby checks up on a friend named Borman who has been living alone in a rural, swampy area near Lafayette, Louisiana. Borman’s perception appears to be detached from reality, and he is living in squalor intentionally. Bobby takes Borman out for lunch, and eventually leaves Borman in Lafayette and returns to New Orleans.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Much of this section shows Bobby attempting to reconcile various interpretations of the meaning of life. As an intellectual and as someone with an established background and pedigree in scientific pursuit, Bobby wrestles with the limitations of rational thought. For example, he says, “The reason we cant fully grasp the quantum world is because we didnt evolve in that world. But the real mystery is the one that plagued Darwin. How can we come to know difficult things that have no survival value” (146). Here, Bobby contends with the limitations of what humans seem capable of understanding. Evolution as a concept contextualizes everything through the lens of survival: Organisms adapt over time in ways that improve their chances of survival. What Bobby conjectures in this passage is the limitations of the theory of evolution. With the biological imperative to survive removed from consideration, how can we then understand the world? Ultimately, what Bobby comes to realize is that he can’t. The narrator says of Bobby, “He had seen briefly into the deep heart of number and he knew that world would be forever closed to him” (126). Bobby recognizes his own intellectual limitations and accepts that whatever answers mathematics might provide him are futile. He is not capable of discovering those answers, if the answers even exist.
The Nature of Reality is a central theme of the novel. Bobby seems stuck in an existential crisis for most of the novel, especially in the novel’s present. As in the previous section with his friend Oiler, Bobby weighs what others say to him regarding how they find purpose and meaning in life. Significantly, for his acquaintances, the ego is a diminished thing in light of a belief in God or some other Higher Power, and it needs to be in order to make sense of human existence. At the beginning of Chapter 5, The Kid says to Alicia, “You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world,” followed by the harsh truth that “The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here” (127). The Kid frequently points out to Alicia the indifference of the universe.
Bobby is plagued by that very sentiment, but he is also intellectually unwilling to grab hold of any kind of irrational approach to finding meaning. For example, Granellen says to him, “You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life” (173). Granellen uses the imperative here, suggesting that finding meaning in life comes through conscious, deliberate, ongoing action rather than being the result of any mathematical or scientific calculation. Bobby struggles with this concept because he struggles to see the point of it. Against the backdrop of the universe’s apparent indifference and meaninglessness, Bobby cannot see the simple fact that he can make his own reality as Granellen suggests.
The nature of reality and whether anything can be objectively verified is brought to the fore in Bobby’s discourse with Asher. Bobby says, “There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence” (148). What he means here is the theory that things do not exist independently of other things. In this view, it is not until a being saw the stars that the existence of the stars was objectified into reality. This idea brings to mind the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment: If a cat was trapped in a box, and a toxin was released into the box and the cat was killed, one could not know the cat was dead unless one opened the box to verify. While the specifics of the thought experiment include further ramifications, the connection to Bobby’s comment is there. How can one know the true nature of objective reality? How can one know the cat has been killed by the toxin? How can it ever be claimed for certain that the stars were always there even before a sentient being observed them?
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By Cormac McCarthy
