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Allusions
Pages 189-246
Explanation and Analysis—Forget and Remember:
Flashbacks are a central feature of the novel’s narrative architecture. In an “uncalendared” world with no tomorrows or long term goals, the man can only turn to the past to make sense of his nightmarish present. Flashbacks frame his experience of this post-apocalyptic world by contrasting it against his past.
By extension, they inform the reader’s engagement with the novel’s setting, too. On the beach at night, the man recollects a similar, earlier time:
He remembered waking on one such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he’d left steakbones from the night before. Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again.
This lush account of abundance, joy, and beauty juxtaposes itself against the lifelessness of an “ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag.” The “pale surf” under the “myriad of stars” cannot be more dramatically far removed from the “cold and rainy” shoreline heaped with “senseless artifacts.” The novel’s interspersed flashbacks build up a brutal contrast between his—and the reader’s—familiar past and the one before him now.
Flashbacks are as evasive as evocative; some that recall moments immediately prior to the apocalypse provide only tantalizing fragments of exposition. They recall details about the circumstances—“low concussions” happen at 1:17 one night, for instance—but avoid any clear answers about why. The man’s forays into the past may supply nostalgia, but they cannot offer any explanations.
Related Themes:
