Cockroach starts with an allusion to the narrator’s recent attempt to hang himself in order to “escape the sun”. This is a reference which Hage employs to indicate the narrator’s need to escape from his entire existence to a cockroach’s one in the underground. The novel ends with the narrator shooting his lover’s rapist in a pre-planned incident which, nevertheless, ends in chaos. Between the attempted suicide and the completed murder lies the dismal story of the masses of unidentified immigrants in the Canadian city of Montreal. This is a story which Hage recounts with extreme pessimism; the only optimistic insight being that all nations are equal for they are all “are built in the image of a murder” (Ibid 82). Equally, the narrator curses his sectarian and violent past and his racism infested and deprived present, hoping that the future will be in the hands of cockroaches. From the underground of the war shelters to the underground of Montreal’s alleged cosmopolitan life, the narrator is faced with obstacles in integrating himself into mainstream Canadian life.
Hage focuses on his nameless narrator with disregard to the point of origin which he attributes evenly to the entirety of the desolate third world from Iran and Lebanon to Eastern Europe, and Pakistan. Indeed, Hage makes it clear that it is neither because of the narrator’s personal characteristics nor because of a history unique to his war-torn country that he faces these sets of obstacles in making a home in Canada. He represents the narrator’s circle of acquaintances and neighbours as a testament to the failure of integration of those expelled by developing nations and oppressive regimes. He employs different identities which allow him to cope with life in the foreign city, taking on both the imagined despicable cockroach who unsettles the orderly life, by stealing a neatly placed pair of slippers (Ibid 84) or messing with the dial tunes in a radio. These are gestures which he referred sardonically to as “a new house order” (Ibid 149). He was, also, the “noble savage” (Ibid 183) or the “fuckable, exotic, dangerous foreigner” (Ibid 199), personas that he utilized for their appeal to Sylvie’s circle of socialites who “lived in a state of permanent denial of the bad smells from sewers, infested slums, unheated apartments, single mothers on welfare, worn out clothing” (Ibid 182).
This undertaking of different personas by the exceedingly paranoid narrator is amplified as a result of the encounters with racism in Montreal which maintain his excluded status. The French speaking Maitre Pierre, another pretentious Canadian, whom the narrator meets as a dishwasher in a French restaurant, stands as a representation of the racism that hinders integration. It is when he believes that Maitre Pierre refused to promote him because
of the colour of his skin (Ibid 29) that he dispenses his cynical views on the state of Canada’s demographics by saying:
The Québécois with their extremely low birth rate, think they can increase their own breed by attracting the Parisians, or at least for a while balance the number of their own kind against the herd of brownies and darkies coming from every old French colony, on the run from dictators and crumbling cities (Ibid 28).
In reaction to the perceived injustice, the encounter ends with threats to the pretentious Québécois elite; he tells the waiter: “Your days are over and your kind is numbered. No one can escape the sun on their faces and no one can barricade against the powerful, fleeting semen of the hungry and the oppressed” (Ibid 30).
However, despite the outbursts of loathing and rage against both the past, which expelled him with its sectarian violence, and the present which treats him as an outcast, the narrator – indifferent as he would like to portray himself to the different forces of nature – expresses his gratitude once he gets his pay cheque. He says:
On my days of pay, I am grateful, I am grateful for everything, and it shows. I am grateful for the good food, the warmth, the service, the forgotten ketchup that is relocated from a nearby table by a waitress’s thumbs...And at the first sip of beer, the first fries, I forget and forgive humanity for its stupidity, its foulness, its pride, its avarice and greed, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath and anger. I forgive it for its contaminated spit, its bombs, all its bad dancing (Ibid 226-227).
Similarly, when he enters Genevieve’s house in her absence, he imagines the pleasure that would come from having a semblance of a normal life with her, he thinks to himself:
What if I were to stay in her bed? What if she comes home and sees a considerate stranger who makes the bed and saves the other side for her to slip her toes into as she asks me if I am asleep, if I had a good day, kissing my forehead, hoping that I will wake up, take her in my arms, listen to her story about the man who was caught with a rope on a tree looking for a solid branch in the park, early on a cold day (Ibid 81).
These instances of human vulnerability do not figure often in the novel and, when they do, they are transformed regularly and rapidly into gestures of fear or contempt. In the first instance, after a brief enjoyment of his meal, he starts thinking of the “calculation of the bill, the check, the record, of the meal, its price, its nutritional value...” (Ibid 227), whilst the second instance ends with him disrupting Genevieve’s routine through the theft of her slippers. Both acts stem from the narrator’s status of displacement, inducing both insecurity and contempt, which represent hurdles to the attainment of the safety of homes.