Flights

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-51

Pages 52-122

Pages 122-181

Pages 181-258

Pages 258-330

Pages 330-403

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Movement, Time, and Space: Literary Form

The narrator’s discussion of movement addresses what she sees as the fundamental human instinct towards travel, exploration, and novelty. The narrator understands movement as taking place within a fluid exchange of time and space, and constant movement through travel allows the narrator to experience time and space as fluid. The work’s structure—the narrator’s travel fragments interspersed with fictional stories—reinforces this theme of movement, as the reader follows the narrator’s thoughts despite very few overt referents to time or place. The movement is between characters, stories, curiosities, and states of awareness, with the narrator’s personality emerging even in the work’s fictional sections and thus blurring temporal and physical boundaries.

The narrator first understands that movement is crucial to her life when she is a child watching the river near her house: “Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest” (4). From that moment, the narrator seeks to emulate the life of a river, flowing around obstacles and undergoing constant change. She describes her personality as inconsistent and decides not to pursue a career as a psychologist because of the stasis that personality profiling implies. Instead, she allows her own identity to morph with those of the people she sees and writes about. Movement, for the narrator, is an energy that is both internal and external.

The narrator’s interest in the Greek word kairos lends nuance to the narrator’s understanding of fluidity. As the professor lecturing on the cruise ship Poseidon explains, kairos refers to a circular time that people who live static lives in society cannot access (387). Its etymology also incorporates notions of finding “the appropriate moment” for a crucial action (347). While herself remaining in constant movement, the narrator depicts such crucial moments in each of the vignettes she includes, from the sudden disappearance of Kunicki’s family to the biologist’s poisoning of her terminally ill lover to Chopin’s sister smuggling his preserved heart into Poland. When these characters stop moving and focus on the context of their lives, they find themselves in a crucial moment. Once the character completes this crucial action, presumably freeing them to begin moving through their lives again, the narrator switches to another vignette, another character, or her own writing. The form of the novel seeks to dissolve any notion of staying in one place longer than is necessary.

Contexts of Authorship

Throughout the narrator’s fragmentary travel writings, she questions the morality of her work—whether she should be writing fictional stories and whether she should be engaging with the world as a traveler—as well as its global and environmental context. Though the narrator’s travels aim at other “pilgrims” and anatomical or curiosities exhibits, the effects of pollution, climate change, and animal abuse are defining characteristics of the narrator’s era and therefore inescapable while traveling. The narrator situates her writing amidst these environmental and political issues.

The narrator meets Aleksandra in the Stockholm airport after they both agree to make space on an overbooked flight by staying an extra night in the city. When the two speak, Aleksandra describes her work researching animal abuse as a global phenomenon. Documenting these abuses allows her to contextualize “proofs of human wrongdoing” (121). She hopes her work will serve as “humanity’s confession,” reflecting the myriad harmful acts that humans commit against the environment and each other. After this interaction, the narrator becomes more concerned with the nature of her own writing and the instances of animal abuse she witnesses.

The narrator’s fragment on beached whales committing suicide explores the possibilities of Aleksandra’s work (271). The narrator writes that human volunteers sometimes encourage a beached whale back into the ocean—only for hunters to then kill that same whale. Humanity’s treatment of whales is hypocritical and dependent on the cultural context of the waters the whale swims through, which the narrator attempts to understand in relation to her own writing. In the vignette about the biologist assisting in her dying lover’s death, the narrator discusses animal rights activists protesting against helping beached whales, which the protestors believe are choosing death. In both instances, the narrator ponders the context of the death and its implications for her writing.

After discussing Verheyen’s “travels” into his amputated limb, the narrator asks, “Am I doing the right thing by telling stories?” (212). She wonders whether lectures would more effectively disseminate information and observations than creative writing. Her anxiety relates to the subject matter of her writing and whether it wouldn’t better serve the world for her to instruct rather than create, according to her cultural-political context. Ultimately, however, the narrator believes herself to be capturing a kind of “confession” opposite to that of Aleksandra; a confessional of interior lives and stories of community that challenge Aleksandra’s depiction of a uniformly destructive human nature. Through stories, the narrator reveals the nuances of human identity and encourages empathy for those living in widely different contexts.

Preservation and Travel

The narrator directs her travels at curiosity exhibits and preservation museums. Similarly, her fictional vignettes often feature anatomical scholars, the plastination of organs, and characters experiencing the loss of a loved one. The narrator thus reveals her interest not only in traveling around the world but traveling within the human body itself. For the narrator, the preservation of a person—whether a deceased loved one or a transitory stranger met during her travels—may take the form of either writing or plastination. When that person is sufficiently preserved, they can be viewed by a multitude of others, thereby achieving a kind of immortal existence independent of time or place.

In the narrator’s vignette about Philip Verheyen and his anatomy student, she connects Verheyen’s study of his amputated leg with imperialistic conquest: “One discovers, and names. Conquers and civilizes. A piece of white cartilage will from now on be subject to our laws, we’ll do with it what we will now” (186). By preserving his leg and later studying it, Verheyen is attempting to colonize his own body, understanding it at its most basic level so as to better control it (i.e., manage his phantom pains). Such efforts to pin down or freeze are paradoxical, however, because to preserve something is also to allow it to travel. An organ preserved in a jar or a person preserved in writing can travel through the imaginations and experiences of many different people. The narrator’s vignettes make the argument that both interior and exterior travel is possible through preservation. Verheyen writes, “I’ve spent my life traveling, into my own body, into my own amputated limb […] What have I been looking for?” (211). This question coincides with the unknown place the narrator herself is constantly in search of. As Verheyen explored his body, so the narrator explores the world; both use travel to search for a means of explanation.

At the conclusion of the novel, the narrator reflects on the “new species” of plastic bags that litter every country, city, or rural countryside that she visits. She is unsettled by these man-made bags precisely because they persevere without having any interiority; they are empty yet remain immortal. Flights combats the notion of empty immortality that these plastic bags represent; the narrator actively builds characters to preserve the interior human experience across time and place. Furthermore, she preserves the exterior experience of travel through her vignettes on travel psychologists. In their philosophy, people travel with intent, unlike the empty plastic bags that move without agency according to the wind. By linking preservation with travel, the narrator uses Flights to discuss the necessity of remaining aware of the human condition, both interior and exterior, as a way to immortalize tradition, culture, and individual identity.