For this month's discussion, let's begin at the beginning:

About the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That's it, really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know.

It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that—well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been—or, more precisely, being about to be—hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say that these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap—the crater—that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers. (p. 3)

As you read, did you make note of the punctuation? Did it help or hinder your understanding of the narrator and his story? Do you think it serves a purpose other than making the text readable?

When I began reading Remainder, the first thing I noticed was the punctuation. Take another look at these first two paragraphs. There are periods, question marks, apostrophes, commas, semi-colons, colons, and em dashes. I'm amazed McCarthy failed to work in an ellipsis and an exclamation point. As I continued reading, I noticed that the punctuation played an important part in helping to establish the tone of the prose. Em dashes, for example, are often used to indicate breaks in thought, and our unnamed narrator has certainly suffered from scattered thoughts since the accident.

What do you think of the narrator? Is he reliable or unreliable? Is he a hero or an anti-hero?

Near the end of the third chapter, the narrator goes to a coffee shop and observes two groups of people. The first, media types with sharp clothes and colorful cell phones, remind him of a television ad showing beautiful people having fun. The second group consists of homeless people, and he decides that they are genuine. "That they really did possess the street, themselves, the moment they were in. (p. 56)" He tells us he takes one of the homeless for a meal—to find out more about his genuineness—but we quickly learn that he's lying. He hasn't spoken to anyone and has drawn a new conclusion: the homeless are usurpers and only pretend to own the space around them.

Initially, I didn't know what to make of this scene. It took many more pages before beginning to think that the narrator uses it to set us, the reader, up. He lies then fesses up in order to make us believe he's incapable of lying even though he began with a perfectly believable lie in the first place. Although I spent most of the book liking the narrator, it took me all the way to the concluding scene on the airplane before deciding he is an anti-hero. As he searched for genuineness, I sympathized with his plight because I often feel like I act a part as I go through life. However, as his search turned more frantic, his reenactments became increasingly beyond reason: a murder, a bank robbery, a hijacking. The ending snuck up on me, and I didn't realize the level of his disconnect until after I finished the book.

What of the reenactments? Are they surreal? Hyper-real? What is the narrator trying to accomplish? What is he searching for?

Although the beginning of the book spends a fair amount of time setting up the rest of the book, I'm still not exactly sure about the narrator's purpose. Since the accident, he clearly feels like a second-hand version of himself. He says he is looking for authenticity, the mysterious thing that makes a moment real. At first, the reenactments seem like his way of recapturing his memories. Yet, he does things like obsessively practice having his shirt brush against woodwork and slows down the reenactments so that the actors are barely moving. He leaves reenactments in "on" mode even when he isn't present and has actors work in shifts to run around the clock. He watches a scene in real life while simultaneously recreating the same scene using a miniature architectural model. For me, his search for authenticity became more and more unauthentic as the book progressed.

What is the remainder?

After having a tire repaired, the narrator also asks for a fill-up of his car's window washing fluid. Two liters are poured into the reservoir but:

They'd vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don't ask me why: it just did. It was as thought I'd just witnessed a miracle: matter—these two litres of liquid—becoming un-matter—not surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated. (p. 171)

At the above moment, he believes he has seen something amazing and wants to understand it, down to the fraction of a second and to the tiniest molecule. He wants to experience the remainder, whatever is left over after matter is stripped away. Of course, such a feat is impossible as is clearly demonstrated seconds later when the blue fluid squirts out the dashboard and onto his pants. I'd have given up at this point (maybe sooner), but the narrator is undeterred. What is with this guy?