American Highways: Recurring Images and Themes of the Road Genre

Get your motor runnin' Head out on the 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 energy that manifests itself culturally through the mediums of literature, film, and music. Indeed, the "road" genre is a microcosm of America itself. The journeys undertaken in these stories frequently are associated with the search for the elusive "American Dream," and the obstacles (or roadblocks) hindering the search for the Dream-racism, class division, government or police oppression, gender discrimination, and cultural differences, for example-are obstacles that America as a whole has yet to overcome. Of course, not every American is a restless wanderer, and the trail is not limited solely to Americans. Nevertheless, it does play a large enough role in American culture to justify the generalization. The restlessness of Americans has been commented on almost since the first settlers arrived in the New World. A British official in the early 170Os noted that 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 that they Should forever imagine the Lands further off, are Still better than those upon which they are already Settled" (Wood 128). Commentators on American life such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Walt Whitman also have noted the restlessness of the American character. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "there is no truth but in transit" (Patton 12). For Turner, it was the existence of the frontier that produced "that restless, nervous energy" inherent in the American character (Billington 19). For de Tocqueville, it was the pursuit of happiness, the "feverish ardor [with which] the Americans pursue their own welfare." This "feverish ardor" manifested itself in peculiar behavioral traits, at least to de Tocqueville's European eyes: In the United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the 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 the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the 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 that complete felicity which forever escapes him. (136-37) If, as Phil Patton has declared, "There is nothing more American than being On the Road" (9), one may ask if the rootless culture noted above is a particularly American phenomenon- a search for the "American Dream" perhaps-or if it is simply an expression of a wider human wanderlust. One way to seek an answer to that question is to examine the genre conventions of "the road," and to ask if the recurring themes manifested therein are more associated with the United States than anywhere else.1 The road genre contains frequent use of myths and symbols of the American West or the frontier, such as references to cowboys, hostile Indians, pioneers, gunslingers, shoot-outs, wagon trains, and so on. The powerful iconic image of the 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), the protagonists are mining a rich seam of familiar American imagery. …