One of the first things that stood out to me when I started reading Money was the immediacy with which transportation was established as a setting in and off itself. Throughout the course, the modes, means, and practices of transportation have been present, if not emphasized so heavily as in Money, and have influenced both the flow and the shape of the texts thus far. In Roxana, her frequent travel is a manifestation of her fluidity, both as an individual and as lady capital. In Emma, it is the means by which Emma identifies and secures social affluence in first her critique of Mr. Knightley for his lack of a carriage, and second through the relative lack of it which allows Highbury to function in a semi-insular social sphere. In Howards End, it is the backdrop for the single-minded purposes of Mrs. Munt and the means by which country and urban, Howards End and Wickham Place intersect.

In Money however, transportation is no longer a means to an end in such a way, but begins to function as an end in itself. Like Roxana, John Self’s continuous movement between nations, New York and London to her England, France, and Holland, facilitates the constantly fluctuating fortunes of the protagonist and results in the ultimate demise of whatever notion of an original self either character initially embodied. Crucially, I believe, it is in one of these sites of transportation, the airplane, when the fiction of Self’s film, Good Money/Bad Money is conceived. This moment ties together the theme of transportation with the quasi-titular subject of the novel – the film and, I would argue, creates an avenue in which the movement of the novel’s various vehicles and their passengers can be paralleled with the movement of money in the novel, the way in which loans and debts are transferred, cancelled, and reconstituted in a new form, much like the protagonist John Self.