No Exit

Part 2 of No Exit heightens the stakes of the kidnapping plot, as Darby realizes that Jay definitively has been kidnapped and becomes more convinced that she has to act to help the little girl, introducing the theme of Responsibility in Life-and-Death Situations. Darby is drawn to help the girl as soon as she can, despite not knowing when support will arrive or whom exactly she can trust. Although the storm has already created an emergency situation, the kidnapping casts the danger of the weather in a very different light. Thus, while Darby’s reason for driving out in the storm is itself a life-and-death situation with her mother, the novel adds an additional layer of intensity with a kidnapping plot. Darby’s sense of responsibility shifts from visiting her mother to saving Jay, since Jay’s life is more immediately urgent. Yet in both situations, Darby has thought very little of her own safety—driving in a terrible snowstorm; plotting to rescue Jay—as the life of someone else hangs in the balance.

The theme of Perception Versus Reality is developed in this section specifically through the use of time in the novel. As night falls, Darby’s warped sense of time becomes increasingly stressful. She “[i]sn’t sure what [i]s more nerve-racking—running out of time or having too much of it” (43). She is caught between the delay at which help may arrive, given the intensity of the storm, and the knowledge that the bad weather is the only thing keeping Jay’s kidnappers confined to the rest stop. Though she doesn’t know whether she wishes for time to move faster or slower, she does remain consistently conscious of the significance of time. She thinks, “The difference between a hero and a victim? Timing” (47). Ultimately, Darby’s (and the reader’s) perception of the changing circumstances is driven by a shifting experience of time, which vacillates throughout the novel between highly significant and meaningless. These conflicting means by which time is significant or insignificant adds to the thriller novel’s sense that “anything goes,” which increases the tension of the novel.

Even as she knows that the time of the present is urgent, in this section of the novel Darby often imagines how her present experience will be understood in the future. As she breaks into the van and speaks with Jay for the first time, she thinks:

[This] would be on the news. She’d just broken into a man’s car (already technically a crime) and decisions were being made, right now, that would later be recited to a courtroom. Attorneys would nitpick the minute-to-minute details. If she survived, she would have to answer for every single choice she’d made, good and bad (36).

Darby’s musings on the future reveal an optimism that gradually dissipates in the subsequent portions of the novel, as she becomes increasingly convinced that she will not survive the night trapped on the mountain. Though she frames the notion of survival within the conditional in this quote (“if she survived”), she still believes that her accounting of the night will occur.

Darby’s focus on the future in this section further leads her to tell herself a story about the kidnapping even while it is happening, which allows her to assert control over a situation that is rapidly becoming more and more chaotic. As she draws a sketch of Lars while she decides which of the other strangers she should trust, she thinks of its utility, casting herself as a potential hero in the narrative: “The police would find [her sketch] useful; maybe they’d even release it to the media to aid in the coming manhunt. […] It would look great on CNN” (42). Though Darby, in this section, sees herself as someone who plays a key role in Jay’s rescue, she is not yet confident enough to place herself in the main role of the ill-fated plot she hatches with Ashley, indicating reserves on her behalf about the severity of the life-and-death situation she finds herself in; Darby does not wish to believe she will have to stoop to the level of the kidnapper just yet and that the legal system will mete out justice to the kidnapper(s).