The quest for understanding the Pascal's journey for meaning is ironically challenging, given that the plot of the story is basically that he himself cannot find the narrative meaning of his own life. He does all the right things that he knows to try, like marriage, which is interesting, but then burdensome and unfulfilling, and he tries to find meaning in money, but ends up as a gambler, and then abandons his identity wholesale hoping to be a different person than he is, without much luck.
The reader has an additional tool for understanding his life though, which is that Pascal's life is presented as a literal story in novel form. That layer of information gives Pascal's life the quality of fatalistic design, because his life is kind of an argument about how not to look for meaning. His failure is shown to be meaningful as a symbolic reminder that the reader look to something beyond their own resources for meaning, perhaps to the narrative quality of their own fate.
This interpretation makes sense, considering the role of loneliness and death in the narrative. In his egocentric desire to be the hero of some meaningful, harrowing narrative, he stumbles across the death of his mother, and then later, he struggles to endure deep isolation as a true pariah. These challenges are also the challenges that face any human, and therefore any reader, so that the point of the story might be to push past such egocentric points of view.
When the reader sees Pascal exploiting marriage for its meaning, they might notice another path he failed to take. Instead of focusing on what he might be able to gain through marriage, he might have explored what he could offer as a sacrifice. This self-sacrificial path is hinted at throughout the novel, especially when he learns that his community thinks he is dead. The idea of his own death is jarring to him, and his death is detached from his community. They don't feel a deep connection to it, because he has not invested in his community but only in himself.
