The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men is an allusive comparison that turns a routine sight on the lake path into an image of chilling isolation. As the narrator watches early joggers moving through a gray morning, their blank faces and private radios make them appear less like a crowd than separate figures sealed off from one another.

Reference in the scene

The phrase appears as the narrator observes joggers already covering their miles before the workday. Their destination is ordinary—pinstripe and panty hose—but the description makes that routine feel strangely hollow: each person is wrapped in sound from a private radio, and the faces remain blank. The comparison draws attention not to exertion but to the absence of visible connection between people sharing the same path.

Imagery and narrative effect

The image of a cocoon gives the radios a double effect. They accompany the joggers, yet also enclose each one in a private sound-world; the group’s proximity does not dispel its isolation. In the surrounding scene, the lake is gray beneath a sullen sky, and the narrator is already trying to reason away unease after a nightmare. Against that unsettled background, the joggers’ familiar morning ritual takes on an estranging quality. The comparison makes an everyday urban sight feel remote and unsettling, and the narrator’s response—shivering, hands deep in pockets, then turning toward home—carries the observation into a physical withdrawal from the scene.