American Highways: Recurring Images and Themes of the Road Genre

Abstract

Get your motor runnin' Head out on highway Lookin' for adventure And whatever comes our way. Steppenwolf, Born to be Wild Americans are a restless people, imbued with a kind of nervous manifests itself culturally through mediums of literature, film, and music. Indeed, genre is a microcosm of America itself. The journeys undertaken in these stories frequently are associated with search for elusive Dream, and obstacles (or roadblocks) hindering search for Dream-racism, class division, government or police oppression, gender discrimination, and cultural differences, for example-are obstacles America a whole has yet to overcome. Of course, not every American is a restless wanderer, and trail is not limited solely to Americans. Nevertheless, it does play a large enough role in American culture to justify generalization. The restlessness of Americans has been commented on almost since first settlers arrived in New World. A British official in early 170Os noted New World colonists migrated as their avidity and restlessness incite them. They acquire no attachment to Place: but wandering about Seems engrafted in their Nature; and it is weaknes incident to it they Should forever imagine Lands further off, are Still better than those upon which they are already Settled (Wood 128). Commentators on American life such Frederick Jackson Turner, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Walt Whitman also have noted restlessness of American character. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, there is no truth but in transit (Patton 12). For Turner, it was existence of frontier produced that restless, nervous energy inherent in American character (Billington 19). For de Tocqueville, it was pursuit of happiness, feverish [with which] Americans pursue their own welfare. This feverish ardor manifested itself in peculiar behavioral traits, at least to de Tocqueville's European eyes: In United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather crops; he embraces a profession and gives it up; he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure, he instantly plunges into vortex of politics; and if at end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over vast extent of United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness. Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of complete felicity which forever escapes him. (136-37) If, Phil Patton has declared, There is nothing more American than being On Road (9), one may ask if rootless culture noted above is a particularly American phenomenon- a search for Dream perhaps-or if it is simply an expression of a wider human wanderlust. One way to seek an answer to question is to examine genre conventions of the road, and to ask if recurring themes manifested therein are more associated with United States than anywhere else.1 The road genre contains frequent use of myths and symbols of American West or frontier, such references to cowboys, hostile Indians, pioneers, gunslingers, shoot-outs, wagon trains, and so on. The powerful iconic image of cowboy, eulogized in film and print, evokes notions of proud individualism, frontier justice, and rugged heartland morality. When appropriated by modern-day travelers like Billy (the Kid) and Wyatt (Earp?) from Easy Rider (1969), protagonists are mining a rich seam of familiar American imagery. …