45 pages • 1 hour read
Flights
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 52-122Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 52-79 Summary
The narrator describes her philosophy of time as similar to islands: “archipelagos of order in an ocean of chaos” (53). She rejects the standard view of time as linear and progressive. Rather, the narrator believes in gathering a “mean” time based on an individual’s relation to other time zones, locations, and forms of transportation.
Airports act as small cities for the narrator. They often include everything a person needs to live, from food to entertainment. The narrator reasserts her belief in the sanctity of movement from the perspective of her time in airports: “It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement” (55). The narrator introduces the “Three Basic Travel Questions”: asking another person where they are from, where they are coming in from, and where they are going.
The narrator discusses her distaste for trains in one fragmentary section. The travelers who choose trains over airplanes are “cowards” whose end goal is always to return to the place they started out from. These travelers who vacation once a year seek a temporary escape from their lives without having to leave everything behind, as the narrator herself prefers.
While in the Stockholm airport, the narrator meets a woman named Aleksandra when both agree to stay a night in the airport hotel after their flight is overbooked. They meet at the hotel bar. Aleksandra describes her work documenting the global mistreatment of animals as “humanity’s confessions.”
The narrator does not try to describe the places she visits, as she believes it is impossible to fully capture a place in words. She owns two guidebooks: an 18th-century account of human curiosities written by a Polish monk, and Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick.
At the airports the narrator visits, she notices travel psychologists presenting lectures to waiting passengers. The narrator relates a lecture that discusses the origins of psychology as grounded in understanding people in a nonrelational way, outside of space or time. Travel psychology instead responds to an individual’s desire for travel and what they are traveling “toward.” Before the lecture ends, the narrator becomes curious about a nearby man and lets her thoughts wander. She leaves for her gate while the psychologist continues their talk.
From the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, Tokarczuk includes a map of Boufarik, Algeria, from 1882 and an unspecified map with Chinese characters from 1984 (54; 76).
Pages 80-107 Summary
The narrator begins a fictionalized account of her experience on a ferry. The captain, Eryk, has become depressed and aggressive and is drinking heavily. To Eryk, the island he lives on is so remote as to exist at “the very edge of the world, where time, reflected off the empty waterfront, turns around disappointed and heads towards land and pitilessly leaves this place to its perpetual enduring” (83). He is frustrated by living so far away from civilization.
Prior to working the island’s ferry, Eryk sailed on various kinds of shipping vessels. At one point, he was incarcerated in a foreign country after his captain framed the crew for smuggling. The only English book in the prison library was Moby-Dick, which Eryk read religiously during his three years there. He considered finding such a book in such a place a phenomenon of synchronicity. After his release, Eryk resumed his wandering career on ships, taking advantage of whatever opportunity presented itself, until he landed on the island he currently lives on and began working the ferry. He was briefly married to a woman living on the island, but they divorced because Eryk struggled to share his physical space with her.
On March 1—the day of the narrator’s voyage—Eryk arrives at the ferry for the morning commute. Instead of steering for the mainland, Eryk turns the ferry into open waters and takes the unsuspecting passengers out to sea. The passengers quickly discover his plan and use cell phones to call for help. The ferry is recovered and Eryk imprisoned.
The narrator returns to writing fragments on herself and her travels. She describes her mental agility in being able to cut unpleasant things from her memory and never revisit them, thereby purging her mind of pain. She discusses travel psychology’s understanding of the psyche as originally an island, without influence from others or relationality. Through these fragments, the narrator reveals herself to be traveling through the Middle East and surrounding countries.
Pages 108-122 Summary
The narrator begins a fictional vignette about a young sultan and his struggle to rule his harem and small kingdom. The harem’s hierarchy is based on age, with the older women living on the upper floors of the palace and the younger women on the lowest floors. The young sultan has inherited this kingdom from his father. He is paranoid that his council of advisors do not respect him as a ruler; his main interests are his harem, luxury, and the children he has taken under his care. When a neighboring kingdom threatens the sultan’s people, the council of advisors plot to usurp him. The sultan’s mother, Menchu, visits him one evening to present her plan: He will escape as quickly as possible while the harem follows via caravan.
Rumors of the sultan’s plan spread. His women begin packing as a military force intended to replace the sultan convenes outside the palace. Menchu implores her son to escape but he is determined to bring all the children with him. Menchu issues an ultimatum that the sultan choose either herself, a trusted ally, or the children, who she warns will slow down his escape. The sultan chooses the children. He stabs his mother in the stomach and leaves with the children. The narrator mentions that Menchu “swore that she was telling me the truth” (118), suggesting that the narrator spoke with the sultan’s mother during her travels.
In fragments, the narrator describes traveling on a bus with veiled women and talking to a donkey breeder, who attests that the donkeys he raises are adept at conveying travelers to the site of Jesus’s baptism. The narrator then discovers a crime against animals that she writes about to Aleksandra: Atatürk of Turkey once banished the feral dogs of Istanbul to a small island, where they cannibalized each other.
From the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, Tokarczuk
includes a map of Parc Monceau in Paris (108), France, from 1878.
Pages 52-122 Analysis
The narrator continues to incorporate aspects of her own life and personality into the fictional vignettes she writes, allowing her to remain nominally anonymous. In the vignette on Eryk the ferry captain, the narrator characterizes Eryk as devoted to the Herman Melville novel Moby-Dick, which she herself claims as one of her two favorite guidebooks (72). The boundaries between author and subject are continuously—and deliberately—blurred, signaling that there is no distinction between the narrator and those she writes about but merely fluid movement between identities.
Eryk’s vignette corresponds to an analogy the travel psychologist’s lecture draws between the human mind and the geography of an island: “[T]he island represents our earliest, most primal state prior to socialization” (97). The narrator introduces this concept of “island time” as a segue into discussing Eryk’s internal struggle with living on a secluded island. From the travel psychologist’s perspective, Eryk’s life on the island represents the mentality of an early, unsocialized person—i.e., someone who is not influenced by the constraints of modern society. Eryk’s impulse to travel, explore, and move must therefore flow from this original mental state. The vignette suggests that each individual would discover themself a traveler if they were to remove themself from the distracting and binding influences of modern social life.
This link between the narrator and the characters she writes emerges from her use of fragments, which act as small narrative islands in which the narrator can experiment with the philosophies that excite her. The narrator’s writing style embodies her desire to leave a story, place, or job suddenly and then move on to the next. There is no hierarchy to her fragments or stories, unlike the hierarchy in the sultan’s harem, which imposes strict physical boundaries on women based on their age, relevance, and importance. At the end of the sultan’s vignette, the narrator upends the harem’s hierarchy and transitions the sultan into a life of movement, suggesting that an overly rigid social structure will inevitably dissolve.
The narrator reinforces her argument that humans are inherently traveling creatures with the statement that “[i]t is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement” (55). She makes this claim while discussing the function of airports, which for her enhance the experience of movement and travel. The narrator generalizes her desire for movement, stating that it is a “widely known” fact that humans need movement in order to fully experience life.
Unlock all 45 pages of this Study Guide
Plus, gain access to 9,150+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By these authors
Featured Collections
Books & Literature
View Collection
Mortality & Death
View Collection
National Book Awards Winners & Finalists
View Collection
Nobel Laureates in Literature
View Collection
Popular Book Club Picks
View Collection
Popular Study Guides
View Collection
The Booker Prizes Awardees & Honorees
View Collection