As much effort and study McCarthy must have put into these descriptions, I am sure he has a more than passing familiarity with Unamuno's thought and his theory of life. Science, says Unamuno, is a "cemetery of dead ideas", and so it felt as I read McCarthy's dialogue and text describing the to me arcane theories of eminent physicists. McCarthy even makes passing reference to Unamuno (p. In the shadows of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, two events that are given as the pre-conditions for the character Bobby Western's existence, it is clear science alone will never succeed in comprehending or representing the deepest truths of reality, even as its capacity to destroy us expands with each passing day.Ĭoincidentally, I happen to be reading as well Miguel de Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life. And I agree that reality, in all its beauty and tragedy, is what the artist McCarthy is bent on describing. The characters' extended dialogue about physical theories of reality, with their arcane scientific references, wearying as I found them, do make a little better sense to me now as a record of some mathematical/scientific efforts to understand and explain reality. In the midst of The Passenger myself, I am finding it a bleak, sometimes hard book to read, so I am encouraged by the review to keep at it. Thank-you to Professor Noble for his review.
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