The Pleasurelines cruise that the senior Lamberts take is meant to be a diversion, but it is one on which they are trapped. The cruise ship is full of senior citizens, all of whom have different ways of coping with their old age. On one extreme end, there are the Söderblads, a Swedish couple who focus only on frivolity and pleasure. On the other end, there is Sylvia Roth, a tough-minded woman who prides herself on facing the central tragedy of her life—the murder of her daughter—head on.

The fact that the boat is traveling north, toward the Arctic, gives a literal and metaphorical darkness to the setting. The boat is meant to symbolize both death and the denial of death: a relentless progression toward the cold and dark and the ways in which people distract themselves from this movement. Although Alfred’s condition deteriorates during this cruise, he retains a sense of perspective that the more seemingly-alert passengers lack. While “alone on top of the world”—standing on the boat’s top deck, from which he will shortly fall—he registers the remoteness and impersonality of the northern landscape: “In the forests that stretched west to the limits of visibility, as in the purposeless rushing of the clouds, as in the air’s supernal clarity, there was nothing local.