America’s failure to preserve its long-distance passenger rail operation has been a disaster for a number of different reasons. The lack of a high-speed transit system by rail has been economic failure, environmental failure, caused an incalculable social breakdown and, admittedly less importantly, made it much difficult for Americans to grasp the full dimensions of the train as metaphor in fiction. From Murder on the Orient Express to Strangers on a Train to Snowpiercer to Train to Busan to a thousand other examples, the passenger train has been exploited by writers to the fullest potential to take advantage of this particular means of mass transit and situate it microcosmically as an allegory of society. Victor Pelevin’s “The Yellow Arrow” is one of the finest examples of those other stories that engages this aspect of train travel.
The genius of Pelevin’s concept is its denial of the fundamental element of train service: transport from specific destination to the next. Pelevin’s conceit is that the train in this story has no destination and, in fact, is never intended to make any stops. It is the ultimate distillation of the metaphorical microcosm of the self-contained train symbolizing society. After all, society’s march toward civilization is all journey with no destination even conceived and yet that speeding train which is evolution of society toward a more civilized state can—and has—gone wildly off the rails over history. Such the fate of Pelevin’s train, but the construction of metaphor goes much deeper.
The train isn’t just a quick journey, it is where people live their lives. They fall in love and get married and die. The have weddings and funerals. Some live in luxury and others not so much. The train is truly a representation of human existence as everyone knows it. There is graft and corruption aboard the train and there are shortages of necessities and black market dealings. There is also philosophical speculation about whether life exists off the train and, if so, is it different? It is better? Is it possible? Or is life on the train the only possibility?
As noted, trains rife with the potential for creating allegory and some dig much deeper than others. Strangers on a Train, for instance, only barely takes place on a train and it is primarily a functional device to symbolize the extent to which coincidence determines fate. Strangers with absolutely nothing else in common except a desire to be rid of a nagging obstruction to their happiness can cross each other’s paths and be given the isolated space necessary for conversation to reveal the flaws in communication in a way that would be implausible aboard an airplane or bus. On the other hand, director Bong Joon-ho uses the train metaphor in Snowpiercer to delineate an entire socio-economic ideology. Few stories engaging the train-as-society metaphor explored it to the expansive limits as Pelevin does in “The Yellow Arrow.” In fact, despite being published in 1993, it may yet still remain the single most complex utilization of this allegorical metaphor to date.
