The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Published 2022 · 120,742 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Philosophical Fiction

How hard is The Passenger to read?

The Passenger scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 70 out of 100
Technical vocabulary from mathematics, physics, deep-sea diving, and automobile mechanics. Long philosophical dialogues draw on advanced scientific concepts.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
Sparser than early McCarthy — more dialogue, shorter descriptive passages. But the philosophical conversations are syntactically demanding and the lack of quotation marks persists.
Abstraction: 70 out of 100
Extended discussions of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, quantum mechanics, the nature of mathematical objects, and the Manhattan Project's moral legacy.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Dense with scientific and philosophical content. Multiple unresolved plot threads — the missing passenger, the government conspiracy, Alicia's death — layer without resolving.
Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
The central mystery is never solved. The government conspiracy is never explained. Bobby's trajectory is away from answers, not toward them.
Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
The submerged plane, the missing passenger, the atomic bomb, and Alicia's mathematics all function symbolically, though McCarthy resists systematic allegory.
Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
The tone is elegiac rather than ironic. McCarthy writes Bobby's grief and philosophical searching with earnest seriousness.
Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
No mystery is solved. The missing passenger is never found. The conspiracy is never explained. Bobby ends in European exile, still grieving, still unresolved.
Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
Linear chronology but with interpolated chapters following Alicia's hallucinations (removed to Stella Maris). The episodic structure resists conventional plotting.

How The Passenger is regarded

The Passenger holds a literary regard score of 62 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Passenger sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (214 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Passenger scores 90 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Yes. You’re not charged with anything. You’re just under arrest.
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
Every worldline is discrete and the caesura ford a void that is bottomless. Every step traverses death.
Mythos: Irony and Satire iv (irony iv)
Then slowly it began to fade. He knew what the truth was. The truth was that he was losing her.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
Stückelberg was a Swiss mathematician and physicist who showed up at Sommerfeld’s lab a couple of years too late.

Where the story of The Passenger takes place

  • New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, late 1980 (1980 to 1981), the main setting
  • Tennessee childhood and Alicia's hallucinations, 1960s (1963 to 1972)
  • Paris and Europe, Formula Two racing years (1969 to 1971)
  • Chicago and Stella Maris, Wisconsin, December 1972
  • Idaho farmhouse winter and Ibiza windmill, 1980s (1981 to 1990)

5 things that are true of The Passenger, with the passage for each

  1. The book opens with a hunter finding a girl frozen and hanged in the snow on Christmas day.

    On this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day.

  2. The sunken JetStar holds nine bodies: seven passengers plus pilot and copilot.

    Seven. Plus the pilot and copilot. Nine in all.

  3. Western's friend Oiler dies in a bell dive, not long after the Venezuela job begins.

    Sorry, Bobby. Oiler’s dead. No other way to say it.

  4. In Akron, Western digs up lead pipes full of double-eagle gold coins.

    What tumbled out onto the carpet were about four double handfuls of US Mint double-eagle twenty dollar goldpieces bright as the day they were minted.

  5. John Sheddan's last letter to Western reports that he is dying of hepatitis C.

    Hepatitis C, with complications stemming from a mostly dysfunctional liver

Scenes in The Passenger that Frye would name

26 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
she wore only a white dress and she hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed Alicia's hanged body in the snow is the sacrificial death scene that frames the book.
Katabasis, untitled
Dropping slowly through the dark toward the intermittent flare of the torch below. Western's descent into the drowned jet opens the book's repeated underworld dives.
Masque, untitled
Two blackface minstrels in overalls and straw hats came flapping out in enormous yellow shoes. The Kid stages a minstrel show as a pageant for Alicia.
Sparagmos, untitled
Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone Nagasaki's tearing-apart of bodies, narrated as the father's recollection.
Anatomy, untitled
Stückelberg was a Swiss mathematician and physicist who showed up at Sommerfeld’s lab a couple of years too late. A catalogue-like digression on the history of particle physics.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Crandall it’s me. It’s Alice. I’m a lot bigger now. Alicia recognises the dummy as her childhood toy, a recognition that pivots her grief.

Books that share these scenes with The Passenger

About the author

Cormac McCarthy