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Quote 2

Travis:   "All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that someone should become a person like other people."

Travis writes these sentences in his diary and speaks them in a voiceover near the beginning of the film, just before he sees Betsy in her white dress. Betsy is someone to latch on to, someone with the potential to turn Travis into a person like other people. This quotation characterizes Travis during the first half of the film, while he is still half-heartedly trying to fit in, find a girlfriend, and be a hard-working member of society. He tries to "become a person" by chatting up the girl who works at the porn theater, by asking Betsy out, and by starting a conversation with Palantine in his cab. He handles each of these tasks the wrong way: porn theaters are not appropriate places to take girls on dates, and his swearing makes Palantine uncomfortable. Yet Travis does seem to be making an effort to fit in.

The second sentence of the quotation, expressing Travis's scorn for "morbid self-attention," seems particularly misplaced, even at this early moment in the film. By writing obsessively in his diary, Travis reveals that his own self-attention borders on morbidity. Travis might have a chance at becoming "a person like other people" if he could just snap out of his insular world, which consists of porn theaters, driving to dangerous places, and obsessive loathing for blacks and all that is sexually devious. Travis's attempt at dating Betsy by taking her to a pornographic movie is also part of his own "morbid self-attention." Instead of trying to become a social person, he tries to drag Betsy into his anti-social world, one where the only place to go is the intrinsically anti-social porn theater.

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