The Sheltering Sky

Port wanders through life, searching for purpose and meaning without any clear goals or destinations in mind. Upon his father’s death, he inherited a significant amount of money, so he is financially—and culturally, as a white Westerner—privileged enough to eschew work and other responsibilities in favor of travel and philosophical inquiry. He imagines himself to be a traveler—someone who is adventurous enough to move beyond the trappings of modern “civilization,” signified most recently by the war—rather than a mere tourist, and he never feels better than when he is in motion. As a representative figure of the late 1940s, he wants to leave the war behind him: “The war was one facet of the mechanized age he wanted to forget” (6). The most destructive war in history has inalterably transformed the geopolitical and psychological landscapes.

Port is also a philanderer, and he becomes excited by the exoticized and eroticized native women—all prostitutes—that he encounters in the novel. He is most excited by the blind woman because “he could have made her grateful to him,” experiencing “a shudder of self-pity that was almost pleasurable” (145) in thinking of his ultimate aloneness. His entanglement with native women, particularly one who literally cannot see him, allows him to bask in a self-involved sense of importance, of centrality—as when he sees himself as the