A carefully constructed person

The Americans come off the boat. They may come singly, or in couples or even in a threesome, but there is no safety in numbers, for their fate is sealed the moment they step down the gangplank. The Americans are innocent of course, but they are not very nice. As a rule in the world of Paul Bowles, they tend to be mean-spirited and tight-fisted, and there is also a kind of eerie blankness about them. They think of themselves — Porter Moresby in The Sheltering Sky for example — as travellers, not tourists, belonging no more to one place than another and moving slowly from one part of the earth to another, taking no account of time. Their aim is to be taken out of themselves as they press deeper into the Sahara or the Amazonian jungle, though these estranged, hollowed-out beings do not seem to have much self to be taken out of.