The yellow arrow

Question: The ending is puzzling. If the train encompasses our entire life, then what lies beyond it? Who are the residents of the city the hero sees out the window before his jump?

Pelevin: Well, that’s yet another metaphor — you could say he jumped into a different metaphor. The ending doesn’t mean the hero left this life, that he dies or anything like that. There’s another clue in the novella, if you noticed, which says that the train is not life itself but a sequence of thoughts, and the thought that calls itself “I” serves as the locomotive for the rest. So it has nothing to do with the so-called real world — everything happens inside us, just as everything in the world happens inside us.