The “sleepwalker” metaphor

The “sleepwalker” metaphor describes people who continue to function within ordinary adult life while moving through it with diminished awareness of their choices and desires. Introduced in Dahlia’s account of disappointed working adults, it becomes personal when Clark Thompson recognizes that he has spent years going through the motions. The metaphor distinguishes mere competence from being fully present: a person can keep working, meeting expectations, and appearing successful while feeling little genuine joy or inspiration.

The metaphor in Dahlia’s interview

Dahlia begins with the example of Dan, a successful but unhappy person who works late and has a troubled marriage. She imagines that coaching might change him somewhat without changing the life he has built. Her larger concern, however, is not limited to Dan: adults may follow the paths expected of them, then find themselves disappointed and unable to choose differently because mortgages, children, and other obligations have accumulated around them. She describes this condition as a life settled into one version of itself while alternatives remain painfully imaginable.

Her image of adulthood as full of ghosts gives the metaphor its sense of absence. These people are not literally asleep, nor does their competence necessarily reveal how they feel. Dahlia thinks Dan may not even realize that he dislikes his work. The sleepwalker is therefore defined by a gap between outward functioning and inward awareness: the person carries on, but may not recognize what has been lost or what they want instead.

Dahlia makes the pattern concrete through the workday. A brief, pleasant encounter in the break room can produce an afterglow, but by late afternoon the day has become another day in a repeated sequence. People look forward to leaving work, then to the weekend, then to a small annual allotment of paid vacation. In this account, distraction can be mistaken for happiness. A moment of laughter is real, but it does not necessarily alter the larger routine that absorbs it.

Clark’s recognition

The interview affects Clark because its details resemble his own recent experience. The previous day, he had laughed in the break room at a colleague’s impression of a Daily Show bit. Remembering that small pleasure while listening to Dahlia, he feels an inexpressible longing. Her description does not simply persuade him that other people are unhappy; it makes him question whether he has mistaken brief relief and routine for a satisfying life.

After the interview, Clark leaves the Graybar Building and takes a long, circuitous route east toward the relative quiet of Second Avenue. He thinks about the book and wonders whether Arthur Leander had noticed that he was sleepwalking, and whether that recognition might appear in Arthur’s letters to V. The thought turns the metaphor into a question about what friends can see in one another, even when a person cannot see the pattern in himself.

Clark then makes the diagnosis more precise. He realizes that he has been moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for years, but does not conclude that he has simply been unhappy. Instead, he asks when he last experienced real joy in his work, felt genuinely moved, or encountered awe and inspiration. The distinction matters: the metaphor concerns not only visible misery but also the muted loss of capacities that a person may cease to notice.

His recognition also changes how he judges strangers and colleagues. Earlier, he had jostled people using iPhones on the sidewalk and had treated the targets of his 360° reports as subjects to assess. Now he wishes he could apologize to the phone users and to everyone he had written about. He recognizes that he, too, had been minimally present in the world, and that being made the object of another person’s report could be painful. The metaphor thus leads not to self-condemnation alone but to a revised awareness of other people.

Routine, movement, and disrupted infrastructure

The book places this ordinary condition of automatic living beside a world in which ordinary systems have ceased to work. After the collapse, air travel no longer organizes everyday life: airplanes remain on runways and in hangars, their uses reduced to storage for food or shelter for teenagers, while rust accumulates on them. The contrast makes the former world’s infrastructure newly visible. A life once supported by familiar systems could pass without much notice; when those systems fail, their absence becomes difficult to ignore.

The Travelling Symphony’s caravans embody a different relation to movement. They began as pickup trucks, but their engines and fuel systems have been removed because gasoline is no longer useful. Teams of horses pull the rebuilt vehicles, whose wooden and steel wheels, tarpaulin-covered frames, and protected cabs serve practical needs, including keeping children relatively safe in dangerous territory. The transformation is specific and laborious: movement continues, but no longer as an invisible convenience.

The distinction is not that every person in the post-collapse world is thereby awake or fulfilled. Rather, the altered means of travel provide a material contrast to the routines Dahlia describes. A flight or commute can once seem like a background feature of life; a horse-drawn caravan exposes the work, limits, and dependencies that movement entails. The metaphor gains force against this change in scale, from unnoticed habits to systems that must be handled directly.

Escape and purposeful attention

Other journeys in the novel sharpen the contrast between habitual movement and deliberate action without making the metaphor a simple measure of virtue. In Toronto, Kirsten Raymonde and Peter Raymonde leave after the neighbourhood empties. Peter hotwires an abandoned car, but traffic blocks the expressway ramps and side roads, so they eventually continue on foot. They travel east and south, around the lake and into the United States, after border guards have left. Their movement is compelled by the absence of a safe reason to remain, not by the freedom of choosing among ordinary options.

Jeevan Chaudhary’s departure is similarly deliberate in its details. He resolves to follow the lake, avoiding roads and other people where possible. Walking along a difficult beach in snow and twilight, he worries about twisting an ankle and dislikes leaving footprints. Before leaving the apartment, he watches the expressway through a telescope and sees only two people, both moving away from downtown. He remains aware of the silence from Frank’s bedroom and checks that Frank is not breathing, even though he knows the second check is irrational. He also takes a page from Frank’s manuscript, uncertain whether a line about immortality belongs to Frank or to the philanthropist in the text.

These scenes do not show a single, uncomplicated awakening. They show attention narrowed by danger, loss, and practical necessity. Against Dahlia’s account of a life reduced to workdays and anticipated weekends, the journeys make the conditions of movement explicit: blocked roads, abandoned cars, open borders, snow, footprints, and the need to avoid other people. The sleepwalker metaphor remains focused on unexamined routine, while the surrounding narrative asks what becomes visible when routine can no longer carry a person along.

A life on the threshold

Clark’s journey to the airport offers a final, uneasy overlap between routine and crisis. He travels from New York City to Toronto while sleep-deprived, thinking about Arthur, listening to Coltrane, and working halfheartedly on reports. Rumours of the flu are circulating on social media, but Clark does not use those networks and is unaware of them. Through a sequence of fortunate near misses, he passes infected people and contaminated surfaces at the airport and boards one of the last planes to leave John F. Kennedy International Airport.

He does not realize that Elizabeth Colton and her son Tyler Leander are on the same flight until he sees them boarding. Elizabeth is in First Class and Clark in Economy; after exchanging greetings, they do not speak again until the plane is diverted to Severn City Airport. The episode places a distracted, habitual journey on the edge of the social collapse that will make ordinary travel impossible. It does not establish that Clark’s inattention caused the crisis or that he could have understood what was happening. Instead, its dramatic contrast is between how routine the trip feels to him and how rare such a departure will soon become.

Taken together, Dahlia’s interview and Clark’s response give the metaphor both social and personal reach. It describes people whose expected lives may conceal disappointment, but it also implicates someone who has not recognized himself in that description. Clark’s shift is modest and consequential: he does not arrive at a new life or a settled answer. He begins to notice the difference between passing through a day and being present in it, and between evaluating other people and recognizing their vulnerability.