Fantasy as solace for the poor

Fantasy as solace for the poor is a survival resource in Ferdinand Bardamu’s early days in New York: the imagined beauty of women and the consolations of cinema briefly soften hunger, isolation, and contempt. These dreams do not overcome material deprivation; they give him enough warmth to sleep and enough renewed courage to face the next stretch of life outside the theater.

Hunger and the promised miracle

At the heart of his pilgrimage, Bardamu encounters a spectacle that seems to confirm the promise of America. The beautiful women arriving in a sudden wave appear to offer a revelation so complete that, in easier circumstances, it might lift him beyond ordinary human life. Yet the passage keeps the body in view: hunger interrupts the aesthetic vision, and Bardamu admits that a sandwich is all he needs to believe in miracles. The contrast makes fantasy both powerful and precarious, an exaltation that coexists with an immediate material need.

He remains on a bench for one or two hours, stupefied by what he sees and convinced that he has nothing else in the world to hope for. The women do not notice him; their apparent nearness cannot become a relationship or a rescue. Fantasy fills the distance between the lonely observer and the life he longs to enter, while the hours of watching expose how little the vision can alter his actual position.

The poor man as a vessel for dreams

Bardamu describes a tramp’s trick: an old wallet is stuffed with putrid chicken innards. He then turns the grotesque image into a figure for human life, comparing a man to a fatter, hungrier, mobile version of that wallet, with a dream inside. The dream is not proof that poverty has disappeared. It is what the impoverished person carries within a body still governed by hunger, and the comic, repellent comparison refuses to sentimentalize that inner consolation.

The same material constraint shapes how Bardamu handles his money. He has very little, is afraid even to count it, and cannot see clearly because he is seeing double. He feels the thin banknotes through his pocket alongside his counterfeit statistics. The fantasy that sustains him therefore coexists with calculation and anxiety: he cannot simply spend his way out of need, and the dream must do its work without relieving the pressure of scarce cash.

Cinema as temporary shelter

In the movie house, fantasy takes on a more organized, communal form. Warmth, darkness, and the sound of a large organ make the theater feel almost like a heated cathedral. The screen’s moving light kindles dreams, while the films remain not quite real, leaving an indistinct space for the poor, for dreams, and for the dead. Cinema offers Bardamu a brief refuge in which the world can seem converted to loving-kindness, even though he knows that this feeling belongs to the theater and not to the streets beyond it.

He deliberately chooses the erotic dreams. A blonde on the screen breaks the silence with a song about loneliness, and Bardamu would gladly weep along with her. Her image and song give form to a loneliness that the actual women passing through the city have not answered. The screen supplies a private, receptive encounter where the street offers only distant beauty and indifference; its consolation is fabricated, but its emotional effect is real enough to matter to him.

A reprieve measured in days

The movie’s effect is practical as well as imaginative. After taking in a small dose of ecstasy, Bardamu believes he has enough courage in his guts to last at least two days. He leaves before the lights come on, already confident that he will sleep. At the Laugh Calvin, the night clerk’s failure to return his greeting no longer carries its former weight: an intense inner life, he observes, can melt a contempt that has been accumulating for years.

In his room, the blonde from the film returns in imagination to sing her entire song of sorrow to him. Bardamu helps her put him to sleep, as he describes it, and concludes that it is not possible to sleep alone. The imagined singer turns the theater’s temporary comfort into a companion for the night. But the scale of the reprieve remains revealing: fantasy can get him through sleep and sustain him for a couple of days, while hunger, poverty, and social isolation remain waiting outside. Its value lies not in escape from those conditions, but in making their continuation momentarily endurable.