In what circumstances does the narrator find himself as the novel opens?

In the opening, the presently unnamed narrator is stuck in rush-hour traffic four blocks from the Lincoln Tunnel from New York to New Jersey. His radio goes out, leaving him with nothing to occupy his mind. Finding a break in traffic, he makes it into the tunnel. The narrator ruminates that the tunnel can make men man, recalling a well-educated man who was deathly afraid in the tunnel and sold his home in Princeton to live in a dirty New York apartment. He thinks of the tunnel as purgatory.