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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Hitchhiker
In America, the most well-known image of Death is the Grim Reaper, a skeleton wearing long black robes and carrying a soul-reaping scythe. With “The Hitchhiker,” Fletcher creates an alternative version of Death in the play’s titular character. Although he shares the Grim Reaper’s fundamental motivations, the hitchhiker is his physical opposite, a rumpled-looking businessman in a suit. The hitchhiker’s ordinary appearance belies his true nature, but it also hints at the fact that dying is not necessarily a bad thing but simply an inevitable fate that every human must reckon with.
Adams first crosses paths with the hitchhiker on the Brooklyn Bridge at the moment of his death, and the two begin a tense cat-and-mouse game across America. The play’s living characters cannot see the hitchhiker. He appears only to Adams, the only character who has a score to settle with Death.
Both Adams and the hitchhiker know that Adams will eventually lose their game at the moment when Adams accepts his death. Although the hitchhiker invokes fear in Adams, Fletcher’s emphasis on his calm demeanor and ordinary appearance suggests that he is not an evil character. Rather, he is just fulfilling his duty. Just as it’s normal for humans to fear Death, it’s natural for Death to come and collect when the time comes.
The Landscape
“The Hitchhiker” is full of references to Americana, from roadside soda shops to iconic landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Jersey Turnpike. These details would have conjured familiar visuals for the listening audience in the 1940s, helping to immerse them in the story. They also symbolize normalcy, the safe and recognizable world of the everyday. Before departing on his road trip, Adams anticipates “smooth, decent, civilized roads” (94). Until the hitchhiker appears, Adams’s story is one of an everyman traversing an ordinary setting. His descriptions paint a picture of beautiful, serene country roads and familiar sights, grounding the story in a sense of reality and safety.
After Adams encounters the hitchhiker too many times for comfort, the verbiage he uses to describe the landscape shifts. The appealing setting is slowly infused with malice as Adams is hounded by Death. Adams emphasizes the “monotony” and loneliness of the landscape as he begins to feel that he is in danger. Even the ground is characterized as “cold and lifeless,” reflecting Adams’s feelings of hopelessness and foreshadowing the reveal that he is lifeless himself. As he rests at a trailer park in New Mexico, Adams describes the New Mexico night as “vast, soulless” (101). Viewed through the lens of his paranoia, the beautiful landscape is distorted into a menacing void. This shift in perception helps listeners understand the extent of Adams’s fear and strengthens one of the play’s key themes: the horror of the mundane.
Sleep
Over the course of his six days on the road, Adams’s driving pace becomes frantic as he tries to outrun the hitchhiker. The constant sense of motion lends a feeling of chaos to the script, so it’s notable when Adams finds momentary reprieve from this whirlwind of action through sleep. Sleep represents sanity and safety, offering an escape from the twisted world Adams finds himself in and from his own haunted mind.
The motif of sleep appears at several key moments in the play. After initially becoming unsettled by the hitchhiker, Adams is able to ease his mind through “a good night’s sleep in Pittsburgh” (96) and feels optimistic until he sees the hitchhiker again. Sleep functions as a reset button, restoring him temporarily to a normal mindset.
Later, after Adams’s erratic behavior disturbs the female passenger in his car, she recommends that he get “a good dose of sleep” to recover (99). Adams agrees with this suggestion, believing that finding a place to sleep on the side of the road will help him gather himself.
Ironically, although Adams chases sleep while trying to outrun death, sleep has long been associated with death in literature. The motif of sleep as death dates back to ancient religious literature, and expressions like “dead asleep” and “sleep is the brother/cousin of death” have been around for centuries. The fact that Adams craves sleep foreshadows the fact that he is already dead and suggests that, if he were to follow the hitchhiker into the permanent sleep of death, he would find true peace.
