Bali is the setting of a seductive but short-lived escape fantasy. For the narrator and Muriel, its decisive pull lies not chiefly in the island’s local traditions but in the hedonistic Western community around Kuta and Legian; their effort to turn that life into a future of their own ends in separation, leaving Bali as both an idealized refuge and the place from which the narrator returns to Paris with a failed business venture.

Setting and Beach Society

The narrator and Muriel travel from Surabaya to Bali when they have a few days’ vacation. Local celebrations, traditional music, and ancestral rites interest them less than the Westerners living in lodges on Kuta Beach and Legian. Surfing, psychedelic mushrooms, and torch-lit parties on the waterfront form the world they want to enter. The contrast matters: Bali is presented through the visitors’ selective gaze, as a setting for a Western counterculture rather than as an account centered on Balinese life.

That society has its own hierarchy. Passing tourists with cameras are barely visible to the couple; backpackers, preoccupied with avoiding overcharging, strike them as paranoid; Australian surfers appear easygoing, often accompanied by attractive women. Above these groups are the chic babas, seasonal residents who arrive from Goa, rent handsome wooden beach houses, and later leave for Formentera. Their linen and silk clothes distinguish them from the tourists, their marijuana is better, and their unhurried lives seem to require no pressing business. Their money comes from trade they keep vague: drugs for the most daring, despite the risk of life imprisonment or hanging, and precious stones, furniture, or fabric for others.

Muriel, Envy, and the Dream of Staying

Muriel’s beauty and kindness win her acceptance among the chic babas, while the narrator believes he could not enter their circle without her. His response is jealousy disguised as disdain: he pretends to reject what he envies, and the relationship begins to sour. The social distinction on the beach thus becomes intimate. Muriel’s access to the group makes visible the narrator’s own exclusion, even as the couple continues to spend time among the people whose life they covet.

The more often they return to Bali, the less willing they are to imagine going back to Paris, resuming their studies, or finding work after the narrator’s stay. On good days he pictures himself writing on a bamboo-house terrace by the sea, sarong at his waist, smoking a joint Muriel has passed him while she goes swimming. Her blond, sun-tanned figure moving down the beach completes the image of a shared life that appears effortless. The imagined future is not merely to visit Bali again, but to make the island the center of a life divided between Bali and Paris, with Bali receiving most of their time.

The Bikinis and the Failed Plan

They begin looking for a practical means to stay. In Kuta’s shops they find bikinis sewn with gold thread: mediocre in quality, but attractive enough, Muriel thinks, to sell in Paris for ten times their cost. The pair can buy them for a dollar each. They invest all their money, together with the allowance Peace Corps workers receive at the end of their service, and order five thousand suits. The French Foreign Ministry is to pay for shipping them to France; the hoped-for proceeds will set in motion the money that could support their life between Paris and Bali.

The scheme converts the beach fantasy into a calculation of purchase, shipment, and resale. But the timing turns against them. A month before the manufacturer delivers the boxes, Muriel leaves the narrator for an older baba, more self-assured and cooler than the increasingly tormented young man he has become. The shipment arrives into a life they no longer share. Bali’s promised future has already broken apart before the goods meant to finance it can be put to use.

Departure and Narrative Significance

The narrator returns alone to Paris carrying a manuscript for a first novel about an enchanted love story and five thousand bathing suits sewn with gold thread. The bikinis have become a material reminder of the failed love and, in his view at the time, of the failure of his life as a whole. He remembers the winter that follows as atrocious. After losing twenty pounds in the tropics, the slenderness that seemed graceful in Asia looks, in Paris’s drab light, like serious malnutrition or illness.

Bali’s significance in this episode rests on the reversal between imagined ease and actual consequence. A beach society first viewed as an invitation to freedom becomes a hierarchy the narrator envies; an entrepreneurial plan meant to secure that freedom ends as surplus cargo after Muriel’s departure. The island remains vivid in the story not as a lasting home, but as the setting of a future the couple tried to buy into and the point of departure for a lonely return.