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Quote 3

Travis:   "Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man."

Travis says this in a voiceover early in the second half of the movie. The scene takes place after the unnamed passenger talks about shooting his wife and directly after Travis accidentally hits Iris with his cab, and just before he goes to buy his guns. The difference between this quotation and the previous diary quotation, concerning "morbid self-attention," is stark, even though both entries are about loneliness. In the first, Travis knows he is lonely but strives to fit into society, while here he fashions himself as a chosen person, a man who has been predestined to be lonely as part of a special assignment from God. He will no longer try to fit in with the rest of the world, so he fashions himself not only as an outsider but as a vigilante. Travis believes that his subsequent violent actions, including the attempted assassination of Palantine and the final bloodbath, are heroic, suggesting that "morbid self-attention" has become his main motivation.

The phrase "God's lonely man" is the title of an essay by Thomas Wolfe, an American writer from the South who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century. Schrader uses a quote from this essay as the epigraph to the screenplay: "The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon . . . is the central and inevitable fact of human existence." The ironic relationship between this quote and the moment when Travis defines himself as "God's lonely man" is that while Wolfe was trying to explain that loneliness is what all humans have in common, Travis believes that his loneliness is what makes him special and different from everyone else. Wolfe understands, however, that discovering that everyone is lonely will not help cure loneliness. His point is that although each man feels chosen, no one actually is.

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