The Passenger

Note on Review

This review covers both Passenger and Stella Maris.

Review

At the end of 2022 I walked into the bookstore and bought Cormac McCarthy’s last true novel, The Passenger. Published a few months prior to its companion novella (though I am not sure what it really is) Stella Maris, Passenger follows Bobby Western, the last of Cormac’s lonely men. My first read of Passenger left me concerned that I’d missed a series of memos, had been left out of some conversation. It felt aimless and disinterested in itself. I hoped that Stella would fill in gaps or provide some sense of completion. It dashed those hopes on its publication.

McCarthy is probably close to my favorite writer. I think the only person that could give serious competition at this point is Annie Ernaux. So, I felt that the fault was in myself. I determined to read everything else the man had ever published and then revisit Passenger. In 2023, I read Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and re-read The Road for the severalth time. 2024 included reads of Cities of the Plain, The Dark Waters, A Drowning Incident, Wake for Susan, Outer Dark, another re-read of The Road, The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Suttree, as well as The Counselor screenplay and The Stonemason. (I had read No Country for Old Men in 2021 and did not get around to a re-read at the time.)

In 2025, I read no Cormac at all.

And so, it was with some hesitation that I picked up Passenger at the beginning of 2026, knowing that I had now finished the man’s bibliography and was revisiting his final work. Transposed, my highlighted selections and commentary on the two books (which I will simply refer to inclusively as Passenger from now on) total nearly 6,000 words. They are a tangle of funny lines, oddities, eccentricities of Cormac’s prose, and things I thought were important to the story.

The plot ostensibly centers on Bobby Western, and we find him about to dive into deep water before sunrise, where he will inspect an out of place airplane. Out of place more than just by virtue of being underwater. It is also fresh off the line, expensive, and missing its black box, and one passenger. Western is then plagued by black tied figures, who ransack his apartment, lock his assets, and essentially chase him out of his life. Alongside, each chapter features italicized interstitials in which Western’s sister, Alicia, communicates with ‘eidolons’; phantoms or hallucinations that present and speak to her, most notably The Thalidomide Kid. The first page of Passenger finds a hunter discovering Alicia’s frozen body, hanging from a branch. Everything in Passenger, aside from the interstitials, deals with Bobby’s self-punishment, guilt, and shame following.

Stella Maris is an extended dialogue—190 pages of nothing but Alicia speaking with a doctor at the titular psychiatric hospital. Where Western is quiet and self-assured almost to the point of self-destruction, Alicia is sort of a mess. She is also quiet, and she is a mathematical genius. She is so intelligent that at one point she alludes to mathematical skill being a signifier almost of a different species. She discusses famous mathematicians like Poincare, Dedekind, Frege, Hellinger, and Wittgenstein almost as friends, though certainly as peers. She graduated the University of Chicago at 16. She studies at IHES almost purely to be in Europe while her brother is there racing cars. Speaking of her brother, she is desperately in love with him. She is suicidal. She is, very probably, delusional.

Both characters occasionally say things with extreme confidence that are simply not true. Bobby at one point corrects a woman on her pronunciation of the word “dour” to “dew-er” and calls it “the preferred” (P p64) It is not, in fact. Is it a regionalism? Some archaic pronunciation that Cormac has wrested from the ages? At best, it is an old British/Scottish pronunciation of a similar word (though even that is apparently more of a dyoo-er). Alicia asserts that the violin arrives in history wholly formed, “there is no prototype of the violin. It simply appears out of nowhere in all its perfection” (SM p121). This is not even true when looking askew. There is so much talk of S-Matrix Theory, String Theory, Quantum Mechanics and the like that I cannot even begin to evaluate those statements.

Passenger spends a little time being interested in its igniting plot, the plane crash and the titular passenger. Though the missing passenger is perhaps not actually the titular at all. We never learn anything else. There are a variety of other things that you could call passengers—The Thalidomide Kid, an unseen and perhaps hallucinatory person that’s on an empty oil derrick with Bobby. My preferred is Bobby. Western frequently asks himself when he will begin taking the threats from the mysterious visitors seriously, but never really does. His ultimate fate is one more of self-punishment than self-preservation.

Stella Maris and the dialogue within are nearly impenetrable to me. There are plenty of lovely lines and tidbits that make one sit back in their chair and think, but there is no plot at all and it does not stand on its own as anything other than a transcript of a fairly boring conversation. I have worked in acute psychiatrics. A patient once gave me a handwritten explanation accompanied by a long seminar on how to always win, with mathematical certainty, the game Blackjack. I am sure everyone who has spent any time at all working in a psychiatric setting will have a similar story or twelve. This probably sounds dismissive, but the dialogue gives us nothing from which we can hang any certainty.

I feel a strong pull to use this review to try and sift through Cormac’s last words to find meaning. I think this is a fool’s errand. I have purposely resisted reading other reviews or discussion threads on the book. I am not sure there is any plot to explore in any sort of rewarding way. I have revisited The Road a half dozen times not because of its plot, but because of its moral struggles and themes. Blood Meridian is plotrich, but the contemplation of human evil is central.

There are a few thematic threads that I think are worthy of recognition. The Westerns are the offspring of The Bomb. Their father worked with Oppenheimer et al to construct the atomic bomb, and many words are given to how they feel about this, and how the father felt about this work. This is some of the more interesting stuff in the book, because it does feel like a contemplation of evil. In Lynch’s masterwork Twin Peaks: The Return, the detonation of the atomic bomb at Trinity is a birthplace of some kind of ultimate, unknowable evil. Interestingly, McCarthy gives Hiroshima a similar role, though more as a culmination of human evil:

Western fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the west.

(Passenger page 165)

Related to this, again and again through Passenger is the idea that we cannot stop the future. Each time it appeared, I thought of the Coen Bros. adaptation of No Country for Old Men, which includes a monologue from the character Ellis that is not present in the book, but perfectly captures McCarthy’s moral view, in my opinion:

What you got aint nothin new. This countrys hard on people. You cant stop whats comin. It aint all waitin on you. Thats vanity.

(NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, 2007, I have removed the apostrophes to be a bit McCarthian.)

This theme appears in other books. Certainly, the ending of Blood Meridian feels as though it places evil as a sort of unstoppable force. McCarthy’s moral view in Passenger, especially when considered alongside The Road feels explicitly transactional:

Life is strange.
Tell me about it. But I’m goin to say it’s stranger for some than for others.
Maybe it just says that you pay for what you do.
I believe that to be a true statement. I surely do.
Still I think some people might pay more than what they owe.
You speakin for yourself, Bobby?
I don’t know. But I would like to know who keeps the books.
Amen.

(Passenger p251)

Compare to one of my favorite lines from The Road:

Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

(The Road p196)

I do not know if my view of morality is as explicitly transactional as McCarthy’s, but this idea is clearly a long running theme in his books.

The other theme, and one I don’t know what to do with, is on the nature of being and existence. Both Bobby and Alicia speak at length of physics problems, theories, mathematics. But more, they talk of consciousness, and where ideas come from. In his 2017 essay for Nautilus, McCarthy wrote about what he calls the Kekulé Problem. The themes there permeate Passenger. In fact, the opening paragraph of that essay appears very similarly, put into the mouth of the Alicia character in Stella:

What makes it interesting is that language evolved from no known need. It was just an idea. Lysenko rising from the dead. And the idea, again, was that one thing could represent another. A biological system under successful assault by human reason. ¶ . . . ¶ Yes. It [the unconscious] solves problems and is perfectly capable of telling us the answers. But million year old habits die hard. It could easily say: Kekulé, it’s a fucking ring. But it feels more comfortable cobbling up a hoop snake and rolling it around inside Kekulé’s skull while he’s dozing in front of the fire. It’s why your dreams are filled with drama and metaphor.

(Stella, p175)

I call it the Kekulé Problem because among the myriad instances of scientific problems solved in the sleep of the inquirer Kekulé’s is probably the best known. He was trying to arrive at the configuration of the benzene molecule and not making much progress when he fell asleep in front of the fire and had his famous dream of a snake coiled in a hoop with its tail in its mouth—the ouroboros of mythology—and woke exclaiming to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” Well. The problem of course—not Kekulé’s but ours—is that since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place, why doesnt it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like: “Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.” To which our scientist might respond: “Okay. Got it. Thanks.”

(‘The Kekulé Problem’, https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/)

I’ve probably read his essay a dozen times, and I too am fascinated by the problem. McCarthy’s final work does not offer a glimpse into Cormac’s mind as to if he ever resolved on an interpretation. If anything, his final paragraph is also traceable to question posed in Passenger: “Do you tink you can learn all there is to know about yourself from yourself?” (Passenger p234).

There is every possibility that I return to these books again, in some far year, hoping to (as Lynch would say) think-feel my way into an interpretation. There will never be a resolution to any plot, and thankfully that’s not my frustration.

All of this to say, I have now read the book twice and have no idea what to make of it. My gut reaction is that Cormac spent too much time around his friends at SFI and not enough out in the world. But, this is my bias. I’ve read enough philosophy to know that certain questions that divorce themselves so far from the practicalities of human experience frustrate me. Not for their difficulty (or at least, not always), but because there is no clear benefit to understanding them. In scientific research, this is a dumb reason not to explore or fund academicians interested in those questions. When reading literature, it is perfectly valid reason to grind one’s teeth and wish to move on from the equations and abaci.

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Notes

Non-exhaustive. Notes from the second read are flagged with (2).

• p6 - The Kid was at the window looking out at the raw cold. The snowy park and the frozen lake beyond. Well, he said. Life. What can you say? It’s not for everybody. Jesus, the winters are confining.
• p17 (2) - TB: So, at this point we’ve established the sister & the company of either phantoms or hallucinations. As of now, we only know them to be in the sister’s mind.
• p23 - I’ll tell you what else. I think that my desire to remain totally fucking ignorant about shit that will only get me in trouble is both deep and abiding. I’m going to say it’s just damn near a religion.
• p28 (2) - Don’t go there, my dear, said John. You dont want to know. How [Western] secretly hopes to di in the deep to atone for his sins. And that’s only the beginning.
• p30 (2) - I’m afraid there is. It’s near Oak Ridge. His father’s trade was the design and fabrication of enormous bombs for the purpose of incinerating whole citiesful of innocent people as they slept in their beds. Cleverly conceived and handcrafted things. one-off, each of them.
• p40 - I can tell you this shit. But it’s not going to mean anything. I’m not even sure what it means to me. If I think about things that I just don’t want to know about they’re all things that I do know about. And I’ll always know them. Too fucking bad.
• p41 (2) - TB: Leading in from page 40, Western is asking Oiler about his service in Vietnam. Western just keeps asking, what else, what else. Why does Cormac have him ask these questions? To show the difference between Western and Oiler, that Western wasn’t in the war, is inexperienced, or just to put Western as a voyeur?
• p64 (2) - TB: Odd interaction between Western and Debbie. Debbie says the word “dour” and Western corrects Her pronunciation to “dew-er” which is not correct. I went through to listen to a few pronunciation videos and couldn’t find anything like this. I did find that there’s an old British/Scottish version that might sound like “dyoo-er” but yeah. So… Why does Cormac put this here? Regionalism that I don’t know about, or is CM telling us W isn’t a man of letters? Who knows.
• p64-65 - TB: Worth noting that this conversation features a trans character, and one that is quite well written in my opinion. This is the second such character that I can recall in Cormac’s bibliography, the other being Trippin Through The Dew from Suttree.
• p69 - He got me into AA. I had trouble with the God thing. A lot of people do. And then I woke up one night in the middle of the night and I was lying there and I thought: If there is no higher power then I’m it. And that just scared the shit out of me. There is no God and I am she. So I began to really work on that. I’m still working on it.
• p71 (2) - He watched her until she was lost among the tourists. Men and women alike turning to look after her. He thought that God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Don’t close your eyes.
  • What is this chapter doing? We learn Western has an apparently close friendship with a trans person, and it seems uncomplicated. We maybe learn that Western isn’t 100% when it comes to language, w/ that dour/dewer thing. We get some very CM language coming out of the lady, especially the quote from Pascal and “gender dimorphism”. Maybe to show that W can relate/empathize? Has relationships?
• p83 (2) - You think that when there’s somethin that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it ain’t even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be.
  • TB: Lot’s of similarities to other stuff before it. This, along with a few other lines that I’ll mark, remind me of No Country for Old Men. The idea of not being able to get away from things or stop things from coming to you. Also, reminds me of the perennial Hemingway quote from Sun Also Rises about not being able to run from yourself.
• p102 (2) - [Debbie is telling Western of a dream she had about him.] Okay. It was very strange. This building was on fire and you had on this special suit. This special firesuit. it looked sort of like a spacesuit and you were going into the building to rescue these people. And you just walked into this enormous fire and disappeared and these firemen were standing there and one of them said: He’s not going to make it. That suit is an R-210 and he would need at least an R-280 for this. Then I woke up.
  • TB: Dream stuff. Worth thinking about the fact that Cormac believes dreams to be at least sometimes communications from the unconscious mind (subconscious?), which will be explored later in this book/Stella Maris, but also in McCarthy’s writings in Nautilus on the Kekulé Problem.
• p113 (2) - When the light hits the glass and starts back in the opposite direction doesnt it have to come to a full stop first? And so everything is supposed to hang on the speed of light but nobody wants to talk about the speed of dark. What’s in a shadow? Do they move along at the speed of the light that cast’s them? How deep do they get? How far down can you clamp your calipers? z* TB: So, these are all coming from The Kid, in one of the interstitials with he and Alicia. I think these are questions that sound smart but are more complicated in words than in practice. My gut reaction is that this is something related to light as both a particle and a wave. If you think of light as a particle, then whatever is bouncing off is going to lose some energy. My mind went to the game of holding up two mirrors to one another. They do not actually go into infinity, eventually they reach a grey mist. I have no idea if that is light losing its energy, seems doubtful it could be illustrated like that, but that’s what I think about. But I am a social worker, not a physicist.
• p140 - Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.
• p142 (2) - Without malefactors the world of the righteous is robbed of all meaning.
  • TB: This is maybe the first (maybe not) of several times throughout these two books where the characters assert that a thing that has no relation to another thing is not a thing. As in, for thing A to be differentiated from anything else, there must be another thing for it to be differentiated from. What does that mean. We don’t know that darkness exists unless we know about light. Same for good and evil in Cormac’s eyes. A purely good world is indistinguishable from a world with no good at all. I kind of like this.
• p142 (2) - The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.
  • TB: This section has quite a bit on W’s father as this sort of passionless assistant father of the Bomb and his lack of empathy. A lot about a thing not being able to be a thing without differentiation, especially around good and evil. I have a note on the page, Twin Peaks - nuke as birthing something evil. W’s father as a father of evil. But not origin of evil - see Blood Meridian. Maybe a culmination?
• p144 (2) - I answered and listened and then I said no and then I hung up the phone. And in the dream you asked me what they had said and I told you that they wanted to know if we knew anything about them. And I said no. And they said: We didnt think so. And then they hung up. You were the dreamer. Yet if I’d not told you what they said would you have known? ¶ I dont know. ¶ Nor I. Why do you think your inner life is something of a hobby of mine?
  • TB: More Kekulé. It’s all over the book.
• p145 (2) - I dont know. Probably a bit strong. My father was a free agent. A lot of people thought that S-Matrix theory was a reasonable theory. Promising, even. It was just superseded by chromodynamics. Ultimately by string theory. Supposedly.
  • TB: All of this S-M theory, why? What is it doing here?
• p149 - The reason for point particles is that if you stick something ugly in there—such as physical reality—the equations dont work. A point devoid of physical being leaves you with location. And a location without a reference to some other location cant be expressed. Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence. ¶ And yet it moved. ¶ And yet. . . .
  • TB: I wonder to what extent this is an accurate representation of this problem. Cormac spent his last years hanging out with the SFI nerds (complimentary), but doesn’t this just sound like a $10 way to ask, “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?”
• p156 - Being wrong is the worst thing a physicist can be. It’s up there with being dead. . . .¶ Everything is painful to me. I think. Maybe I’m just a painful person.
• p161 - All right. You want to flip for double or nothing?
  • TB: Coin toss scene. A positive reverse of the No Country scene, where the intent is goodwill and it occurs a few times to build up the waitress’s tip.
• p165 - Western fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the west.
  • TB: Certainly feels like he’s discussing the culmination of evil, here. As if these two events reflect a deal with the devil and consign us to a dark fate.
• p174 - I dont know, Bobby. 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. You may call it one. But it wont be one.
  • TB: This is Granellen talking to Western. The work of your hands, as opposed to Western’s father, who did brain wok and tried to blow up the world, in the words of another character. For reference, Granellen is Western’s maternal grandmother, so I think the hand:brain work thing works.
• p180 - Do you think this family has a curse on it? ¶ Western looked up. A curse? ¶ Yes. ¶ Do you? ¶ Sometimes. ¶ What, like the sins of the fathers? ¶ She smiled sadly. I don’t know. Do you believe in God, Bobby? ¶ I don’t know, Granellen. You asked me that before. I told you I don’t know anything. The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions. On my better days anyway.
  • TB: LONG term theme in McCarthy’s writing, the idea of sin and fatherhood and tracking through generations. See The Road, p196: “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.”
• p181 - I think people regret what they didnt do more than what they did. I think everybody has things they failed to do. You cant see what is coming, Bobby. And if you could it is no guarantee you’d make the right choice even then. I believe in God’s design. I’ve had dark hours and I’ve had dark doubts in those hours. But that was never one of them.
  • More No Country, particularly from the film adaptation, “You can’t stop what’s coming.” Which I don’t recall as being in the book, but certainly has the authenticity of McCarthy’s pen, and is probably one of the best scenes in dialogue history?
• p182 - I’m all right, Bobby. Don’t pay no attention to me. I get lonely sometimes is all. She turned and looked at him. Do you ever? ¶ He wanted to tell her that he knew no other state of being. Sometimes, he said.
• p192 (an Alicia interstitial) (1 & 2) - . . .There’s no kind. Which leads us to the paradox that where there’s no kind there cant be one. ¶ One as a number or one as a being? ¶ Either. You can’t have anything till another thing shows up. That’s the problem. If there’s just one thing you cant say where it is or what it is. You cant say how big it is or how small or what color it is or how much it weighs. You can’t say if it is. Nothing is anything unless there’s another thing. So we have you. Well. Do we? ¶ No one is that unique.
  • TB: Reminds me for some reason of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
• p220 - Because beauty has power to ccall forth a grief that is beyond the reach of other tragedies. The loss of a great beauty can bring an entire nation to its knees. Nothing else can do that.
• p221 (2) - Yes. A friend of mine once said: I would rather make a good run than a bad stand.
• p228 (1 & 2) - You want to know when was the last time I saw anybody. I could ask you when was the last time you didnt see anybody. When was the last time you just sat by yourself. Watched it get dark. Watched it get light. Thought about your life. Where you’d been and where you were goin. Was there a reason for any of it. ¶ Is there? ¶ I think that if there was a reason then that would just be one more thing to inquire about. My notion is that you probably make up reasons after you’ve decided what it is you’re goin to do. Or not do.
• p232 (2) - Tell me about it. I have weird dreams, man. I dream about animals and they’ll be dressed up in robes like judges and they’ll be trying to decide what do do with my ass. In the dream I dont know what it is that I’ve done. Just that I’ve done it. You may be right. Maybe I need to get out of here.
• p234 - Do you think you can learn all there is to know about yourself from yourself? ¶ No. I dont think that.
• p251 - Life is strange. ¶ Tell me about it. But I’m goin to say it’s stranger for some than for others. ¶ Maybe it just says that you pay for what you do. ¶ I believe that to be a true statement. I surely do. ¶ Still I think some people might pay more than what they owe. ¶ You speakin for yourself, Bobby? ¶ I dont know. But I would like to know who keeps the books. ¶ Amen.
  • TB: Yet more of the ledgerbooks. McCarthy does seem to approach the world as a series of discrete events/transactions, with credits and debits. Is this the extent of morality, a ledgerbook?
• p269 - When smart people do dumb things it’s usually due to one of two things. The two things are greed and fear. They want something they’re not supposed to have or they’ve done something they werent supposed to do. In either case they’ve usually fastened on to a set of beliefs that are supportive of their state of mind but at odds with reality. It has become more important to them to believe than to know. Does that make sense to you?
• p274 (2) - TB: The Kid here is talking to Western, and feels different but also the same. No cursing, more subdued, less of the rhyming. Dream? Not sure what else it could be. He goes back to cursing at the next page, so maybe nothing. This passage is also offset into its own section, starting from a blank with a dropped capital. I don’t think this happens mid-chapter anywhere else.
• p278 (2) - [The Kid] rang off and shoved the phone into his clothes and set off down the beach again shaking his head. Never a respite from this bullshit. Well fuck it. One more passenger. Off to where? You yourself were seen boarding the last flight out with your canvas carrion bag and a sandwich. Or was that still to come? Probably getting ahead of myself. Still it’s odd how little folks benefit from learning what’s ahead. Dont they look at the ticket? Curious. Those shadows are actually shorebirds going downcoast in this crap. Where the fuck do they think they’re going?
  • TB: This is The Kid, manifesting and speaking to Westing. This is at a point when Western is living in a shack on the dunes, eating roadkill. I would imagine malnourished, probably hallucinatory. I think this is probably a hallucination, though how common are shared hallucinations? Does that matter?
• p282 (2) - He was wet and chilled. Finally he stopped. What do you know of grief? he called. you know nothing. There is no other loss. Do you understand? The world is ashes. Ashes. For her to be in pain? The least insult? The least humiliation? Do you understand? For her to die alone? Her? There is no other loss. Do you understand? No other loss. None.
  • TB: On the following page, McCarthy refers to The Kid as a djinn. Djinn is a pre-Islamic/Arabian term for spirit, a supernatural being.
• p291 (interstitial; 2) - He paced. Odd the way the world is. How you can have just about anything except what you want.
• p326 - I don’t know. I think there are times when you’d just like to get it over with. I think a lot of people would elect to be dead if they didn’t have to die.
• p379 - Perhaps I saw it in a book. As a child. But this is what I dreamed. I wish I had other words for you, Squire. To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.
  • TB: Here, Western is hallucinating or having a delusion in which he’s talking to John. My question to John is: what are we if not our past?