The United States becomes Ferdinand Bardamu’s imagined escape from war and then the setting in which that hope meets poverty, estrangement, and fear. First associated with Lola and her unanswered questions, the country acquires the force of a promised new world; when Bardamu finally reaches its shores, quarantine and the immense vertical city replace the freedom he had projected onto it. Its importance lies in that double movement: America remains a destination he longs for even as arrival reveals another machinery of exclusion and anxiety.

An imagined destination

Bardamu’s interest begins with Lola, whom he meets in the lobby of the Opéra-Comique. Her few answers to his questions about the United States do not satisfy his curiosity; they stimulate it. The prospect of travel is already uncertain in his mind, a journey whose return he cannot foresee, and America begins as a place glimpsed through another person rather than understood at first hand.

The attraction deepens through Bardamu’s physical relationship with Lola. He makes the leap from her body to a whole country, imagining that a nation capable of producing such grace must offer other revelations. This is not a reasoned picture of American society but an erotic fantasy that turns travel into a pilgrimage. The country’s promise is thus intimate and bodily before it is geographical: Bardamu hopes for a new world by extrapolating from the woman before him.

That fantasy develops alongside the war he rejects. During a walk with Lola, a painted shooting-gallery scene of a wedding and a town hall gives way in his agitated perception to the feeling that the shots are directed at him. Later, he tells her that fear has no treatment, describes his dread of being burned after death, and insists that he rejects the war and does not want to die. America offers a direction away from the slaughter, but it does not undo the fear that has formed his sense of the world.

The passage from war to America

After Musyne disappears during an air raid and does not return, Bardamu reduces his aims to two: saving his skin and getting to America. Escape from the war becomes a prolonged, exhausting undertaking rather than a clean break. His desire for the United States is bound to self-preservation, but also to the conviction that it contains experiences unavailable in the ruined world he is leaving.

The Atlantic crossing does not bring him to the country as a free traveler. Bardamu arrives aboard a galley as one of its enslaved rowers, and the reception he anticipates is shaped by the fact that the people there dislike European galley slaves, whom they call anarchists. In his understanding, tourists with money are welcome because European currencies are tied to the dollar; destitute arrivals are not. The contrast makes the welcome he imagined inseparable from class and commercial value.

Bardamu has nevertheless prepared a practical, if fantastical, means of making himself useful. On the galley he has learned to count fleas and compile statistics, and he believes Americans will value his technique. While the ship is held for weeks at a quarantine station near New York, his shipmates warn him against the country and predict that he will find no millionaires in his condition. He answers that he wants to see Americans and their women. Their contempt cannot dislodge the vision that has kept him moving toward shore.

Quarantine and the first landing

The quarantine station turns arrival into waiting. The galley and its crew remain under observation for weeks, and the men follow a routine that includes rowing ashore each evening to fetch water. Bardamu’s companions have little incentive to join his escape: their food is tolerable, their work cannot be taken away from them, they anticipate a small pension at sixty-two, and their Sunday mock elections offer a token sense of freedom. These limited securities, however bleak, seem safer to them than Bardamu’s fever-driven hopes for America.

Bardamu eventually pretends to join the water party and then announces that he will not return to the galley. His shipmates disapprove but wish him luck. When the others row away, he waits until their boat can no longer be heard, counts to a hundred, and runs toward the village, shaking with malaria and fear. He reaches a quiet settlement of wooden houses around a chapel, where a small garrison and its families maintain quarantine installations for a possible plague arriving by ship. A cemetery is already prepared. The place has spent decades waiting for catastrophe; the first American settlement Bardamu enters is therefore not a gateway to open life but a defensive outpost organized around the possibility of death.

The promise of a functioning refuge is further unsettled when Bardamu’s flea-counting statistics are assigned to him for delivery to New York. His employer, Mischief, tells him to behave in town, but the papers are soaked by rain as soon as Bardamu goes ashore. He makes a wad of them to look like a businessman. The improvised disguise is the material remnant of his planned usefulness: he arrives with a skill and credentials that are already becoming wet and unreadable.

New York: scale, labor, and estrangement

Seen through fog from the galley, New York first appears astonishingly upright. Bardamu contrasts it with European cities that seem to lie along rivers or coasts: this one stands stiffly against the landscape. He and the other galley slaves laugh at its shape, but the cold wind from the sea makes their laughter bodily and uncomfortable. The city announces itself not as a welcoming horizon but as an enormous, rigid presence.

Once ashore, Bardamu is carried into the streets among crowds of poor people going to work. He enters a narrow, dirty, damp street and then changes course onto Broadway, where the light remains sickly and gray beneath the high buildings. The people move together at the bottom of the urban canyon, advancing through a city whose streets seem to have no visible end. The sheer scale that distinguishes New York also diminishes the newcomer: Bardamu’s hope of passing unnoticed is unnecessary because the crowd has already absorbed him.

At the Laugh Calvin Hotel, even the promise of friendly service deepens his depression. His room is a box with dark walls and a faint greenish lamp; the manager’s printed assurance that he will keep the visitor cheerful seems only to sharpen Bardamu’s isolation. The city follows him into the room as a series of overwhelming questions and forebodings. Across the court, he sees an Elevated Railway train pass between streets, its speed and rattling structure making the building tremble. Of all the things that horrify him, this moving machine stands out. The city’s modern infrastructure is not experienced as effortless progress but as a violent force passing through the cramped space of everyday life.

Return of fear

America does not leave Bardamu’s wartime fear behind. The shock of meeting Léon Robinson again in La Garenne-Rancy later makes Bardamu feel more uneasy and sleep even worse than before. He connects that encounter to the bad dream he had failed to shake off during the years since New York. The location therefore belongs not only to his travel history but also to a continuing pattern in which fear returns under new circumstances rather than ending with departure.

The later recollection of Grandma Henrouille’s fall into the mummy crypt makes that persistence explicit. Bardamu imagines dramatic sequels during sleepless nights; fear rises through his body, pounds in his heart, and drives him from bed to pace in darkness until dawn. He says he has lost the habit of trust required for sound sleep among other people. In retrospect, the United States is one stage in a wider movement of flight, not a cure for the vulnerability that flight is meant to escape.

The country’s narrative significance rests on the distance between projection and encounter. Lola’s unanswered questions and Bardamu’s erotic imagination make America the destination of a private dream; the galley, quarantine station, rain-soaked statistics, crowded streets, and trembling hotel room strip that dream of any simple promise. Yet the disappointment does not make the journey meaningless: America remains the place toward which Bardamu directs his will to survive, even when its first realities reproduce the precariousness and fear he hoped to leave behind.