Flights

The narrator reintroduces the characters from her first fictional vignette: Kunicki, Jagoda, and their son. By doing so, the narrator explores the consequences of past movements; Jagoda is unable to satisfy Kunicki’s need for details about her disappearance, and her reticence gradually makes him more paranoid. Their story centers around the Greek word kairos, which Kunicki believes is connected to her disappearance. Among the many definitions for this word that Kunicki discovers, kairos represents a moment in which a crucial action can be taken. This resonates with Kunicki’s story, as he suspects that his wife intentionally hid from him for three days with their son—the crucial action being choosing the moment to leave. However, their story returns to the novel because Jagoda did not choose the right moment. Jagoda rejoins her husband after three inexplicable days on the island Vis; both she and Kunicki know that she will leave again, but she does so only after consoling Kunicki. Their story ends with Jagoda and their son disappearing for the second time, presumably at the right moment to secure their lasting movement away from the domestic life she shared with Kunicki.

Kairos reappears and gains additional nuance in Karen’s vignette. Her husband’s lecture on the Greek god Kairos implies that this word functions as a bridge between linear human time and circular divine time. Both definitions inform the narrative structure of Flights. As a recurring word, kairos provides a linear connection between the beginning and end of the novel through Kunicki’s vignettes, which tell a story in sequential (though interrupted) order and reflect the standard human progression through time. In terms of circularity, kairos represents the self-reflexive nature of the narrator’s writing. It corresponds to the recurring symbols, characteristics, and preoccupations that the narrator incorporates in her present-day fragments, her fictional historical vignettes, and her present-day vignettes.

In one of the last fragments of the novel, the narrator writes about the plastic bags she sees all over the globe. Their lack of interiority bothers her: “They’re made up of their surfaces exclusively, empty on the inside, and this historic forgoing of all contents unexpectedly affords them great evolutionary benefits” (396). The interaction between interior and exterior worlds is what drives the narrator’s writing, so the plastic bags represent the antithesis of the narrator’s perspective. Writing, for the narrator, allows her to preserve the people she meets or learns about: She is able to combine the interiority of her characters’ lives with the exterior world she experiences through her travel writing fragments. Confronting the idea of plastic bags and the threat of pollution-driven environmental destabilization contextualizes the narrator’s writing as writing that is opposed to the path that global capitalistic society is on.