“On leaving, I lowered my head in silence, and he lowered his head in return, without a word.” 

The narrator has gone on an impulse to visit the grieving parents of a woman with whom he had a casual affair in college: a woman who has since died. This quiet acknowledgement that the narrator shares with the woman’s father shows the residual sense of formality and decorum that he has, beneath his offhand façade. It shows that some things, such as the hush and humility around death, never change. 

“How many times did I dream of catching a train at night? Always the same dream. A nightliner stuffy with cigarette smoke and toilet stink.

The narrator is only a college student when he has this recurring dream, and already feels the sense of inertia and pointlessness that will haunt him later on. The dingy, run-down train that he dreams about catching is echoed in the actual train that he and his girlfriend will take later in the novel, on their quest to find the sheep. This is one of a few aspects of this first chapter–which in many ways seems separate from the rest of the novel–that resonates mysteriously throughout the book.  

“Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”

The loneliness of sex and intimacy is a preoccupation of the narrator’s, and also a theme in the novel. It is an act that tends to throw