Chapter 2 Summary

Another passenger interrupts the narrator's conversation with the Tousle-headed Poet. This passenger claims to have been ill-used his entire life, from his earliest school days until the end. He blames all this mistreatment on Capitalism turned his attentions toward Communism. But when the war started and he saw Russia allied with capitalist governments, he felt once more isolated in his conscientious objections. So he moved to America, but then America entered the war as well, leaving him no choice but to go to Sweden. In Sweden he had money troubles and, worse, woman troubles. He fell in love with a girl whom he thought to be quite civilized, but then he discovered that she was a mass of bourgeois prejudices and too bound to monogamy. So he threw himself under a train.

Since arriving in the gray town, this new passenger's troubles have...