Fargo

Fargo appears in the novel only as a location in a grimly comic anecdote told by a pathology clerk at the Eastern Maine Medical Center. The clerk recounts a case in which the body of a man who died on a fishing trip in Aroostook County was shipped home to Grand Falls, Minnesota, but was mistakenly routed first to Miami, then to Des Moines, then to Fargo, North Dakota. By the time the error was corrected, the embalming fluid had failed, and the body had decomposed so badly that six baggage handlers became ill. The story serves to underscore the impersonal, bureaucratic, and often absurd treatment of the dead in the modern world, a theme that contrasts sharply with the intimate, ritualistic burial practices Louis Creed later encounters at the Micmac burying ground. The anecdote also reinforces Louis's growing unease with the fragility and indignity of the body after death, a preoccupation that intensifies following the death of Victor Pascow and, later, his son Gage.