Part 3 returns the narrator’s perspective, but now, instead of defending herself to the policewoman, she is alone with her thoughts. At times, she “seem[s] to remember” details from her conversation with the policewoman (80), but soon her narration of this encounter shifts from past tense to future, as she admits that she is not remembering something that has already happened but imagining what may happen soon. In the meantime, running along the beach near her house in Boulogne, she contemplates her obligations to others and the extent of her personal agency in confronting vast political and natural forces.

The scope of the narrator’s argument expands far beyond the limited terrain of law and protocol that comprised the limit of her reasoning in Part 1. Having seen the inadequacy of Bureaucracy as a Defense for Moral Failure, she now turns to fatalism. Citing her coworker, Julien, she suggests that the sea is evil, a malevolent force antithetical to life, humanity, and order. She uses the language of human sacrifice as a metaphor for the inequality that forces people into the sea in in leaky, overcrowded boats: 

Every night we feed that gaping maw, and stuff into it little pieces we've scraped off the edges of the coast, spoonfuls of twenty, thirty poor people […] It's the sacrifice the world pours into the mouth of evil, what it has to give it, so everyone else can sleep in peace and it won't devour everything (83)

The metaphor treats these deaths as inevitable, “what [the world] has to give [the sea],” and the language of “spoonfuls” that must be “scraped off the edges of the coast” perpetuates The Dehumanization of Migrants. Still, by including herself in this “we,” the narrator at least partially acknowledges her culpability and her privilege as a member of the group whose peace is assured by the deaths of others. 

The policewoman, confronting the narrator inside her mind, is now so intimately connected to the narrator that she can communicate without the need for words: 

These mystical flights of fancy, her eyes seemed to say, are just another way of avoiding your responsibilities. Blaming the sea: the most infantile and absurd approach, the ultimate and most pathetic kind of buck-passing, the most desperate. (85)

The narrator knows what the policewoman is thinking because these thoughts are her own. As it becomes increasingly clear that the interrogation in Part 1 was imaginary, the narrator’s interactions with the policewoman are narrated in both past and future tense, blurring the line between memory and imagination. She is the narrator’s doppelganger, and she articulates what the narrator cannot face. In this instance, the novel allows them both to be right. The narrator cannot singlehandedly fix the global, systemic inequality that led to the migrants’ deaths, but she still had a moral obligation to do more than nothing.

While the policewoman indicts the narrator for her own, personal failures, the narrator turns that indictment on the public at large, highlighting The Complicity of Spectators. Standing at the water’s edge, she insists she is not alone on the shore: “there are all the others at my back, so many of them, thousands, millions of people. The entire world is there” (102). She names them on sofas, in deck chairs, in offices, “watching without watching” (102). Through her self-justification, the novel arrives at a social critique that extends beyond her. Those who accuse the narrator of monstrosity, she argues, do so to absolve themselves of blame, even as they continue to accept and benefit from the systems that forced those migrants into the sea at night. 

The chapter closes on a note of uncertainty. Walking into the water, the narrator says she can no longer tell whether she said “You will not be saved” to the young man, or whether he said it to her: “I don’t know which way [the words] are going: from him to me or from me to him” (106). She imagines her own words coming back to her, but since she is not in physical danger, the meaning of the words changes: They refer not to her physical safety but to the spiritual salvation she dismissed as ridiculous in Part 1. The implication is that her soul will not be saved, and that neither she nor the community of spectators behind her will be saved from the moral trap in which they are caught, in which their comfortable lives depend on the suffering of others. In the narrator’s imagination, the words hover in the distance between herself and the caller, occupying both meanings at once.