The Yellow Arrow
Victor Pelevin
A train with no first car and no last, rolling toward a ruined bridge — and nobody on board calls it a train anymore. The shortest book about getting off.
A short novella by Victor Pelevin, written in 1993 and first published in the journal “Новый мир.” The entire story takes place on the Yellow Arrow, a train heading toward a ruined bridge, on which people are born, live out their whole lives, and die without ever wondering why they call it anything other than “the world.” The protagonist, Andrei, is one of the few passengers who starts asking what lies past the windows.
A few lines worth keeping — Pelevin on the book, in his own words:
There’s another clue in the story, if you noticed it: the train isn’t life itself, it’s a sequence of thoughts, and the thought that calls itself “I” serves as the locomotive for the rest. So none of this has anything to do with any so-called real world — everything happens inside us, the way everything in the world happens inside us.
We’re all passengers on this train, but the whole point — I talk about this in the story — the whole point is to ride it without becoming its passenger.
Appears in think → forward