The Hudson River marks a route through the divided city Ferdinand Bardamu encounters in New York: along its banks he finds streets and residents that recall the poor districts around his hospital in Villejuif, then boards an antiquated streetcar for the long ride toward midtown. The river is less a boundary than a passage between forms of urban life, exposing how little the city’s scale and commercial display alter the poverty and isolation that govern his experience.

Riverside streets and remembered poverty

Bardamu explores streets along the Hudson where the buildings seem more human in scale than the immense, monotonous commercial fronts elsewhere in New York. From the sidewalk, he imagines that he could smash every window in a house across the street. The detail compresses distance: here the city feels physically approachable, in contrast to the dizzying facades and advertising that have wearied him in the main streets.

The neighborhoods carry familiar signs of deprivation. Shops avoid displaying goods on the sidewalk for fear of theft; the streets smell of constant frying; children with crooked, swollen knees line the pavements, and barrel organs contribute to a scene that reminds Bardamu of the streets near his hospital in Villejuif. The resemblance briefly makes him wish he could stay among these people. Yet their poverty cannot feed him, and their visible misery frightens him. The river’s surroundings therefore offer recognition without refuge: familiarity does not remove the material distance between Bardamu and the people he observes.

The streetcar journey

A streetcar runs beside the Hudson toward midtown. Its age and physical instability dominate Bardamu’s description: every wheel trembles, as does the vehicle’s entire “terrified carcass.” The ride takes a full hour, turning a relatively ordinary city journey into an experience of prolonged fatigue.

The passengers submit patiently to an unfamiliar payment ritual, tossing coins into a coffee-mill-like device at the entrance while the conductor watches. Bardamu compares the conductor’s uniform to that of a Balkan prisoner of war. The scene makes the journey feel both mechanical and faintly absurd: passengers cooperate with its routine, while the narrator registers the vehicle and its attendant through images of fear and captivity. The Hudson is the route’s companion, but the crossing toward midtown offers no release from Bardamu’s weariness.

Return to the commercial city

After his excursions among the riverside neighborhoods, Bardamu returns exhausted to Richtown and passes again through the lobby lined with beauties. The contrast is immediate: the poor streets had seemed familiar, but staying there was impossible; back in the lobby, desire confronts him as an equally inaccessible spectacle. He is too poor even to check his pockets without apprehension, and he wonders whether Lola might have left town and whether he can ask her for fifty or a hundred dollars.

In this sequence, the Hudson organizes a movement between two kinds of exclusion rather than dividing the city into a simple rich side and poor side. Beside the river, Bardamu cannot live among the poor whose suffering overwhelms him; in the hotel lobby, he can only pass repeatedly before the women he desires. The hour-long ride and the repeated return to the lobby make urban movement circular: exploration changes what he sees, but not his poverty or his position as an outsider.