Bus Stop: American Eye vs. Small-Town Ear

Abstract

Bus Stop — both the play and the movie — is an attempt to dramatize what is pre-eminently undramatic, viz., the evolution of small-town hyperverbality into American hypervisuality. This shift in sensibility or revolution in "taste" is an extremely difficult phenomenon to depict — the playwright, William Inge, here choosing to employ the more demonstrable theme of love/sexuality in order to express or encompass this New-World evolution. Indeed, so vital but protean and mercurial is this problem of the shift from ear to eye, from traditional authority to self-reliance, that such well-known anthologists of American culture as Blair, Stewart, Hornberger and Miller, in their The Literature of the United States, have missed the contribution of Inge altogether and have dismissed his work as "popular" and "lacking depth.'" Yet, Bus Stop remains a profound portrait of the Emersonian/American "transparent eyeball" in transit — the superseding of "small-town" values for Ishmael's passion "to see the world" or the Stevensesque ephebe's command to rise above any municipality in order to "see the sun again with an ignorant eye." All the characters of Bus Stop - from Bo to Grace — are confronted with this American hypervisual rite de passage, no matter whether they are "lucky" or "unlucky" in love.