Part 2 shifts from first person to third, moving away from the narrator’s perspective to show the human reality she refuses to acknowledge. Far from the composite, stock character the narrator of Part 1 imagines, the migrants in Part 2 are individuals with real, vulnerable bodies, real hopes, and real and compelling reasons to risk their lives for a chance at reaching England. The omniscient perspective takes in multiple characters’ experiences, but it lingers longest with the young man who calls the narrator. Physical details force the reader to imagine what his experience feels like: 

His legs were like stone and he could scarcely move them; his neck was rigid with cramp. Then his breathing began to speed up, without him realising, as if someone was pressing down on his chest to expel the air. (76)

This is not a point on a digital map, or an imaginary stand-in for all migrants, a single stubborn man who keeps repeating the same mistake. This is a real human individual with a real body, and his embodied experience contrasts sharply with the narrator’s dismissive language in Part 1, highlighting The Dehumanization of Migrants. 

Across the migrants’ long ordeal, the woman on the radio is not characterized at all; she exists only as a “steady, clear voice” following an inadequate script. When the young man tells her the dinghy is collapsing, she answers that “the rescuers had been alerted and that for the moment there was nothing more they could do. They must be patient and stay calm” (67). Hearing these lines from the migrants’ perspective, as the deck of their inflatable dinghy has gone underwater and people are sliding off the deflated tubes, makes clear how far the narrator’s response falls short of what is needed. If Part 1 shows Bureaucracy as a Disguise for Moral Failure, Part 2 is where that disguise falls away. The young man says, “Help us, we’re sinking, Please” and receives a procedure that does nothing to help. The script does not crack, even as the situation it describes ceases to exist; that intactness is what allows the operator, later, to describe herself as having simply done her job.

The cargo ship that comes, sweeps its searchlight, and turns away symbolizes the narrator’s impotent gaze. The migrants see “the heavy, spectral silhouette” of the ship, hear its fog horn, watch a beam grope across the water; they wave and shout. Then “the searchlight went out, and after a lengthy pause the cargo ship, incomprehensibly, started up again, and slowly turned away from them, abandoning them to their fate” (73). The searchlight makes clear that the ship has seen the migrants in distress. Someone on that bridge looked, registered what was there, and chose to leave. The Complicity of Spectators takes its strongest form in this passage because the ship is, briefly, a witness with the means to act. The searchlight is the precise image of seeing without saving. Delecroix places this episode between the operator’s calls and the slow drownings at dawn so that the radio voice in Cherbourg and the captain on the bridge become versions of the same posture: A person at a console, looking at people in the water, declining to intervene, and continuing on their route. The migrants drift, exchange a few words, watch for daylight; the ship’s lights are absorbed into the dark.