Chapter 10: Conclusion Summary and Analysis

Returning to the image of the bureaucrats on the bus the day of his first mail flight, Antoine closes by drawing a comparison with the peasants he sees on a train. The people were all sleeping and all worn and dirtied by lives of labor. People who once fell in love and dreamed romantic and lofty dreams had been hammered with the same stamp of labor and tossed about by the economic winds until every dream of a quiet and peaceful pastoral life was washed from them. Their national identities and the items that distinguished their homes, even their physical forms, had been sacrificed to the necessity to labor and to travel to where the labor could be found.

Sleeping between two worn and ragged of these peasants, Antoine sees a child, still golden with youth and full of...