The way people twist and create new realities to forget the old never ceases to amaze and fuel the imagination. People strive to forget old, unpleasant, or in the case of Rebecca Makkai's "The Briefcase," life threatening identities or existences motivated purely on self-preservation. Everybody can relate to the feeling of wanting to simply step into another's life to avoid conflict in yours. In the short story, "The Briefcase," this idea is taken to the extreme when a political prisoner switches places with a physics professor and takes the facade to a new level. People will stop at nothing, even lying to themselves, to avoid hardship and escape from the problems or situations they are placed in. The story is very open to interpretation due to the fact that the main character, location, and time are all unknown. The author simply sets the stage vaguely to allow the reader to immerse him/herself into the story. Without any boundaries of time, location, or ethnicity any reader can place themselves into the position of the main character. If fact, all that is known of the main character is that he is a man, once a chief, now a political prisoner alongside 200 others being taken away to an unspecified location. You can sense the gravity and desperation of his emotions in this situation, "He thought of other chains of men on other islands of the Earth, and he thought how since there have been men there have been prisoners. He thought of mankind as a line of miserable monkeys chained at the wrist dragging each other back into the ground" (534). This quote shows the man's mindset at this point, which would not be too far off any others in his position. He is in a desperate situation, so desperate in fact that he is doubting the goodness of mankind as a whole. The man has a strong desire to be free, as we all would, and takes advantage of a slipped handcuff to slip away from the doomed line of prisoners. This escape sets off a chain of