Pines

“Wasn’t necessarily the most useful piece of knowledge, all things considered, but it dawned on him that he loved good coffee. Craved it. Another tiny piece of the puzzle that constituted his identity.”

Ethan Burke doesn’t even know his own name at this point in the novel, but he knows, somehow, that he loves good coffee. Ethan’s journey in Pines is one of identity, with this tenuous link to his past identity hinting that, despite The Malleability of Identity, some core traits may remain immutable. This moment is also one of several references to Twin Peaks, a television series that Blake Crouch identifies as the inspiration for the Wayward Pines trilogy; in the series, the protagonist, FBI Agent Dale Cooper, has an irresistible love of coffee.

“It was the strangest sort of fear. Unspecified. Like walking in the woods at night, not knowing exactly what you should be afraid of, and the fear all the more potent precisely because of its mystery.”

Ethan doesn’t know why, but his instincts tell him not to go to the hospital. The fear is intuitive, though whether it is based in Ethan’s past experience or something imagined is unclear. By instilling these vague fears in Ethan, Crouch opens a space of uncertainty in the narrative, leaving room for questions about Ethan’s reliability as a narrator.

“He caught a glimpse of his bare legs, and as always, the nexus of scarring jogged him out of the moment, fighting to pull him eight years back to a brown-walled room whose stench of death would never leave him.”

With the sight of his scars, Ethan slips back to the scene of his own torture during the Gulf War, although this connection hasn’t been made explicit in the text yet. Ethan’s trauma from his imprisonment and torture is something that he hasn’t wanted to face, yet something that he will be forced to deal with during the course of the novel.