The inciting incident of The Train Driver is the suicide of Red Doek, the culmination of a lifetime of despair and hopelessness. Roelf could see the lack of hope in her eyes when she stood on the track, and he later tells Simon his belief that Red Doek’s despair rendered her not only ready for death, but to some extent already dead. By explicitly linking despair to death, the play implicitly links hope to life, thus asserting that hope makes life worth living. Anyone who faces a lack of hope as abject and absolute as Red Doek’s, then, is at risk of succumbing to her level of despair. As Roelf learns more about Red Doek, he comes to understand the extent of her hopelessness. He visits the town of pondoks (huts) where she lived, and he witnesses how poverty dehumanizes those it affects, forcing the residents of pondoks to “live like animals.” Roelf is horrified to realize that a young mother and her baby lived in such “hopeless” conditions. Her suicide begins to make sense to him, and he realizes that if his circumstances were as hopeless as Red Doek’s, he would likely fall victim to the same despair and similarly seek to end his life. Roelf himself grapples with despair throughout the play as he loses hope of finding Red Doek’s body. This despair ultimately leads him to forsake his own safety in a final attempt at closure. as gang members murder Roelf while he digs a symbolic grave for Red Doek.
All three main characters of The Train Driver lack hope. Red Doek’s despair led her to take her own life, while Simon and Roelf’s versions of hopelessness are less immediate but no less destructive. Simon’s lack of hope manifests as resignation to the bleak conditions of his life. Roelf, meanwhile, repeatedly tries and fails to conjure hope in his own emotional recovery. Through this pervasive lack of hope, The Train Driver suggests that South African society is systemically opposed to progress. Though apartheid is over, society still imposes hierarchies based on race and class that rob people of the ability to imagine and hope for better lives.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Hope vs. Despair ThemeTracker
Hope vs. Despair Quotes in The Train Driver
ROELF: (with vicious deliberation) Ja. Give me her name…or show me her grave…and I will do it. S’trues God. In both official languages because I am fully bilingual…I’ll do it so that her ghost can hear me. I’ll tell her how she has fucked up my life…the selfish black bitch…that I am sitting here with my arse in the dirt because thanks to her I am losing everything…my home, my family, my job…my bloody mind! Ja! Another fucking day like this one and I won’t know who I am anymore or what the fuck I am doing!
ROELF: You don’t understand anything. I’ve crashed! I was on the rails, I was going forward, everything up to schedule…until it all crashed. Thanks to that woman with the red doek I don’t know if I’ve got a home anymore. I don’t know if I’ve got a family anymore, or a job or…ja…a life. You said it: this is the place for the ones without names…and I think I’m one of them now. Roelf Visagie? Who the hell is he? You got your spade so dig another grave, man.
ROELF: …And did you also hear “looked on helplessly”? You at least know what that means, don’t you? That means that the seriously traumatized train driver, who is me, could do fuck-all about it. That’s what they all jump on…But...I already know all that. So then if it wasn’t me, then who was it? God? That’s right. Because there was only God and me seeing how it happened. We were the only other ones who saw the look in her eyes, saw the baby’s head peeping over her shoulder! So if it wasn’t me, then was it Him?…God was only a witness, because it was Roelf Visagie who was tramping down so hard on the brake so that the wheels was screeching on the tracks.
ROELF: All I could think of to say was, “What the fucking hell are you all staring at?” And Lorraine said, “These are your children, Roelf Visagie––go swear at your woman from the bush.”…When I heard those words it was like something just opened up inside me, because I suddenly realized you see that that is what I wanted to do! Ja! I wanted to take a deep breath and then load up my lungs with every dirty thing I had ever heard and then say them into the face of that woman, who still stands there waiting for me in my dreams. I wanted those to be the last words she hears when my train hits her…But the trouble was I didn’t know her name! I mean you know how it is. When you talk to somebody in your mind you think their name, don’t you?
ROELF: This place is a bloody disgrace to humanity!... Have you got no respect for the dead? Because if that is the case then you are worse than those dogs in the bush. And you know why? Because these are human beings lying here and you are also supposed to be one as well…(An excited little laugh as an idea occurs to him)…Ja!...you can even make a cross with [the stones]!... (On his hands and knees, placing stones on the graves) See how easy it is….
(…Roelf moves to another grave where he makes another cross. His behavior is becoming increasingly absurd.)
SIMON (…He speaks firmly but gently): You must stop now looking for her.
ROELF: For who?
SIMON: For Red Doek.
ROELF: Red Doek?...
(For a few seconds the name means nothing to him…)
ROELF: That’s right…Red Doek…I’m looking for her…(He is speaking very quietly)…and her baby…You realize, don’t you, Simon, that it was a woman…a mother…with her baby on her back that stepped out on to the rails…there in front of me…and waited…for me…for the end…staring and waiting…
ROELF: Don’t you feel a bit sorry for them? A little bit sad?
SIMON: No….Why you ask me so much?
ROELF: Why? Because it’s one of your own people for God’s sake. It was certainly somebody’s…I don’t know…husband or brother if it was a man, or somebody’s mother or sister or wife if it was a woman. One thing I know for sure is that if I had to dig a hole and put one of my people in it, I’d have some very strange feelings inside me…even if I didn’t know their name or who they were or what they were.
ROELF: I was thinking about those pondoks in the bush…and I was thinking…she lived in one of those pondoks…Ja! That was what Red Doek called home. A young woman, a mother, with her baby! You get it? That is fucking hopeless, man. Think about it. Wouldn’t you also want to go stand on a railway line and wait for the next train if that is all life has to offer you and your baby? And then to make it worse…that is still not the end…Because the big happy ending is that Nobody Wants Her!...Nobody came to claim her! Nobody wants her! And when we start looking…even we can’t find her.
ROELF: I don’t know what it is like to live without hope, to give up. Because you did, didn’t you? That is why you did what you did because you didn’t believe anymore that good things was going to happen to you and your baby. I’m thinking about it all the time now, trying to imagine what it was like for you.
ROELF: I don't know what it means when I say she is mine, but I know she is because I feel that way inside my heart and so I claimed her. Nobody else wanted her Simon…I do, and that's the end of it.
And I will also tell you that I know when that happened…when she became mine like nothing else in my life has ever really been mine before…it was when we looked into each other's eyes in the few seconds before she and her baby died…underneath me. And you want to know something else, Simon? Maybe it was like that for her also. Ja! Have you thought about that? That I was the last human being she saw. There was no hatred in her eyes, you know, Simon, no anger...just me...she saw me.
