41 pages • 1 hour read
Lucille FletcherThe Hitchhiker
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1941A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Foreshadowing
Fletcher uses foreshadowing prolifically to create the suspenseful atmosphere of “The Hitchhiker.”
The play begins with Adams alluding to unsettling events which have occurred over the past six days. He declares that this “may be [...] the last night I ever see the stars” (94). The story then works backward to fill in the details of these events. Although Adams is happy and healthy when he leaves on his road trip, listeners know to anticipate something going terribly wrong, so a constant feeling of tension looms over the story even before the introduction of the hitchhiker. As Adams leaves his mother’s house, she warns him not to pick up any hitchhikers, directly foreshadowing his accident on the Brooklyn Bridge and the events that follow his death.
Foreshadowing is not confined to the play’s dialogue. Swells of eerie music precede key moments in the story, creating an uncomfortable and anxious feeling. As the hitchhiker appears more and more frequently, the music increases in tempo and intensity, signaling the buildup to the play’s dramatic climax. By continually stoking feelings of unease and apprehension in the listener, Fletcher ensures that the play’s final twist lands with a punch.
Repeated Imagery
Repetition plays a central role in the narrative—specifically, the repetition of the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary. The first time Adams sees the hitchhiker, he barely takes note of the man. The second time, he wonders briefly at the strange coincidence, but he is able to brush it off. Soon, however, the hitchhiker’s repeated appearances get under Adams’s—and by extension the listener’s—skin. The hitchhiker is ordinary in every way except for the interminable repetition of his presence and the unchanging details of his physical appearance. Fletcher builds the play’s central mystery out of this repetition.
Irony
The story’s main source of irony is that Adams spends almost the entire narrative trying to outrun the hitchhiker, fearing that the mysterious man is trying to lure him to his death. This impression is misguided because Adams is already dead. It’s an irony that’s not revealed to the listener until the closing paragraphs of the play, but it massively changes the feeling of the narrative on listening for a second time.
Within the overarching irony there are smaller instances. After suspecting the hitchhiker of trying to kill him, Adams resolves to run him over. At the moment of his resolution, Adams is unaware of the hitchhiker’s identity. Looking back, however, there is a wry humor in the fact that Adams is trying to kill Death, vainly attempting to reverse their natural dynamic.
Unreliable Narrator
Although Adams tries his best to proclaim his sanity, the events he describes are so out of the ordinary that they cause the listener to question the truth of his retelling. At several moments in the play, his perception of the world is shown to be drastically different from the perceptions of others. Secondary characters like the shopkeeper and the female hitchhiker cannot see the man by the side of the road following Adams, and they react to him as if he is a madman.
Adams also describes himself interacting normally with living people, which seems paradoxical if he is truly dead. In the absence of a source of objective truth, listeners are left to conclude for themselves whether the experiences Adams relates are a figment of his imagination or happening in a twisted version of reality.
As the play concludes, it’s unclear whether Adams is mad and ultimately, it doesn’t matter. His retelling is the listener’s only source of truth, enveloping the audience in his terror.
