Abhiroop Das
In Netflix’s ‘Train Dreams,’ the logger and railroad worker Robert Grainier bridges together the past and the future, not knowing where life might take him. Each summer, he sets out with his crew to work all over the Pacific Northwest, leaving behind his loving family. However, as the world evolves faster than he can adapt, Robert has to pay the consequences in a way that rewires his entire existence from the ground up. In doing so, the Clint Bentley directorial, which adapts Denis Johnson’s acclaimed novella of the same name, is a study of how beauty and horror might just be two sides of the same coin. While the story is entirely focused on Robert’s life from start to finish, it is told by a third-person limited narrator, who appears to wield a significant amount of control over the story itself, not just how it’s presented. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Narrator is Likely a Stand-in For the Author of Train Dreams
In ‘Train Dreams,’ the narrator is voiced by veteran actor William Patton, who never actually appears on screen, but has a complete understanding of Robert’s life and death. At the very start of the movie, the narrator condenses Robert’s entire lifetime into a few short sentences, chronicling his birth, death, and the extent of his travels as a logger, railroad worker, and a coachman. This understanding of the narrative defies a linear flow of time, which suggests that the narrator is not necessarily a character within the story, nor is anyone in the world of ‘Train Dreams’ conscious of his existence. Instead, it is more likely that the narrator partially represents author Denis Johnson, whose eponymous novella is the source material for this film. In the book, Denis employs a third-person limited narration, which aligns with the film adaptation’s approach to the narrator.
Notably, all of the narration in the film is directly taken from Denis’s novella, which implies that the narrative voice in both iterations of the story is the same. While the narrator is ever-present in the background of some of the most heartbreaking scenes in the story, he does not exude much emotion himself. Instead, on many occasions, the narrator brings out Robert’s inner complexities into the open, be it by narrating his thoughts or commenting on the absurdity of his circumstances. In doing so, the parts of the movie where the narrator intentionally leaves things ambiguous become even more potent. At the start of the film, one of Robert’s co-workers, Fu Sheng, is thrown down the railway tracks by other workers, and despite Robert asking for a reason at numerous points, neither he nor the audience gets much clarity on the tragedy. The narrator’s silence in this moment suggests that his scale of knowledge might be limited to Robert’s perspective.
The Narrator of Train Contextualizes Robert’s Lived Experiences as a Part of History
Despite seeming omniscience about Robert’s life, the narrator never confirms whether the surreal encounters Robert has over the course of the movie are real or a figment of his imagination. This begins with the visions of Fu Sheng that constantly accompany the protagonist, and reaches a climax with the dream sequence reimagining Gladys‘s death. Furthermore, while the narrator speaks out Robert’s inner thoughts in the scene with the wolf-girl, where he points out the apparent impossibility of the girl being Kate, the narrator neither confirms nor denies the reality of the encounter. As such, there is a possibility that this blurring of reality is intentional on some level, which makes him an unreliable narrator. This lines up with the fact that his omniscience is largely limited to Robert’s point of view, which unintentionally makes the commentary on the changing times all the more layered.
Although the extent of the narrator’s control over the film’s visual language is never explained, there is a good chance that how he describes the events is connected to the film’s vignette-based approach to memory and reality alike. In particular, the narrator hardly shies away from jumping across time, contrasting Robert’s success in building a rail bridge with the creation of a better roadway a mere ten years later, making all previous inventions obsolete. This pattern culminates in Robert learning about space travel. Although the narrator doesn’t speak about his immediate emotions, the follow-up scene, where Robert flies a biplane, is narrated as the moment he sees the interconnectedness of the world. As such, that moment can be interpreted as the narrator’s unique abilities being transferred to the film’s visual symbolism, where a collective understanding of time and space helps him come to terms with his reality.
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