What remains when physics dies and metaphysics fails to answer?

Cormac McCarthy, the man who could describe a sunrise with the same terror that others describe a personality breakdown, returns with The Passenger, the penultimate book of his life and perhaps his most difficult. Or, if you prefer, his most honestly delusional.

The plot—that is, as much as he lets on behind the heavy curtain of innuendo—revolves around Robert Western, a former physicist, who wanders like a guilty man who has forgotten his crime, in the resounding echo of the absence of his sister, Alicia, a mathematical genius with schizophrenic tendencies and a clown (literally) for an inner voice. If that sounds too literary to you, wait until you read the dialogue.

McCarthy constructs a novel on the border between metaphysical thriller and ontological deathbed rehearsal, where conversations about elementary particles carry the same emotional weight as the loss of a loved one. Robert doesn’t chase the truth—he lets it chase him. And he’s always three steps ahead and ten levels more fundamental than he realizes.

The book’s humor is almost trapped in the dark matter—it’s there, but only if you’ve been trained for years to read Shakespeare’s innuendos, Beckett’s silences, and Kafka’s meaningful gaps.

The plot, to be fair, doesn’t interest the author as much as the slow, elegiac farewell to rational faith—whether that be called science or god. Alicia, despite her absence, is the true protagonist. A modern-day Antigone with mathematical equations instead of tombs, refusing to come to terms with a world where intellect is incompatible with existence.

Through it all, McCarthy writes with a sacred commitment to the truth of grief and ignorance. No one knows why they suffer, but everyone suffers. The Passenger is not a book to be read—it is a book that lets you accompany it to the edge of thought, only to abandon you there.

If I could sum up the book in one sentence: It is like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a bereaved person, in the hope that they will love you for the effort.

The long tradition of the novel has been forever concerned with the human condition. That we know others better, and ourselves. Mccarthy's last token to literature follows in the same footsteps, but here the lens is turned to what is most fundamental in the human condition: of unknowing. That our instrument to probe the world isn't enough; that we can't ever fully know the world or ourselves in it, and that there is great sadness in knowing this.

Back | Go to board

Board:

/lit/

Thread:

What remains when physics dies and metaphysics fails to answer?Cormac McCarthy, the man who could describe a sunrise with the same terror that…

What remains when physics dies and metaphysics fails to answer?
Cormac McCarthy, the man who could describe a sunrise with the same terror that…