Plot
It tells the story of a railway station manager who encounters the eponymous commuter who testifies to the existence of a town that cannot be found on any normal map. There is clearly something amiss since the commuter exhibits a disconcerting tendency to literally vanish on close questioning about this ephemeral town. However, based on the information he manages to extract from the commuter, he undertakes an investigation and so boards the train the commuter swears is scheduled to stop at the town. Lo and behold, the station manager arrives at the non-existent town and further puzzling adventures ensue.
Subsequent investigation reveals the town nearly existed - it was narrowly voted out of existence during a planning meeting; the narrowness of the vote directly reflected in the ephemeral nature of the town.
Read more about this topic: The Commuter
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)