Run, Rose, Run

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 24

Chapters 25-48

Chapters 49-74

Chapter 75-Songbook

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Guitars

The guitar was the staple accompaniment in 20th-century country music. Country musicians, including Parton, often appeared on stage with a guitar slung around their neck and accompanied their own vocals, signifying that they were good musicians—and naturals who didn’t rely on advanced technology for their appeal. By 21st-century standards, the guitar is a low-technology instrument and a small component of the enormous aural enhancements that go into producing country music. However, in the novel, the three main characters’ devotion to guitars indicates their allegiance to the authentic roots of country music rather than its commercial potential. AnnieLee even distinguishes between her own hands, calloused from fingerpicking, and the smooth ones of the executives on Music Row, indicating that they’re less genuine than her.

Guitars are a recurrent motif in the novel, and the three main characters’ attitude to them reveals their personalities. For example, Ruthanna’s love of opulence is evident in her collection of guitars, while AnnieLee’s life on the run is marked by having to pawn her guitar to facilitate her passage to Nashville and then having to play using instruments lent by honky-tonks until she borrows Ruthanna’s rosewood guitar. AnnieLee’s guitar-less state indicates the desperateness of her situation and the sense that she needs to travel as light as possible in case she suddenly needs to run, but her borrowing Ruthanna’s guitar signifies her aspiration to stardom.

Ethan, who makes guitars, has a tactile relationship with them, as he enjoys knowing “every inch and every joint of the instrument, every hex head bolt and fret wire, and it felt solid and right in his hands” (120). Ethan’s attitude to the guitar indicates his devotion to the materiality of making music rather than enticement by any superficial aspect. His late-night work on a smaller guitar for AnnieLee with “a mahogany face, curly maple back and sides, and mother-of-pearl inlay around the sound hole” (120) indicates his reverence for her, as she has a similarly diminutive frame (120). Ethan’s gift of the guitar to AnnieLee isn’t only a declaration of love; it fulfills her wish to adopt this guitar as her main one and to reveal and inhabit a consistent identity as opposed to the fluctuating front of a life of secrets.

The Road

Much of the novel is set on the roads of American South. The road, which functions as both motif and symbol, represents journeys both literal and metaphorical, as the characters traverse the highways to reach different stages in their lives.

AnnieLee hitchhikes to get to Nashville for a shot at achieving her country music dreams. Hitchhiking puts her in the vulnerable position of having to trust mostly male strangers, even as she escapes from D, a trafficker who drove her about the South from motel to motel. While hitchhiking, AnnieLee meets with similar male aggression; even a “gray-haired, soft-bellied” (11) driver, who seems benign rather than virile, gropes her. This reinforces AnnieLee’s belief that she can’t trust anyone, especially men, and when she points her gun at Eddie and jacks his truck, leaving him behind, she has the sensation that she’s not only driving but in the driver’s seat of her life. The song that accompanies her flight plays with the word “driven,” from the passive “driven to insanity/ driven to the point of almost no return” to the proactive “driven to be smarter/ driven to work harder” (15). In singing, she goes from victim of her circumstances to author of her own story.

However, later in the novel, when AnnieLee’s attempts to edit the past out of her story prove futile, she takes to the road again and hitchhikes from glamorous Las Vegas, where she was due to play with Ruthanna, back to Arkansas, where she can meet and fight the man who is the source of her troubles. Her being groped by the driver Wade and forcibly taken back to Gus Hobbs returns her to the site of her original exploitation. Still, AnnieLee escapes and move forward thanks to Ethan’s more flexible navigation of the road. Ethan, who in recent times has traded his trusty Nashville truck Gladys—an old vehicle that gives him limited mobility and represents the stagnation in his life—for a tour bus and now a secondhand truck that he borrows from a man in Las Vegas, has developed the instinctive ability to follow AnnieLee’s trail. His capacity to deal with roadside inconveniences such as flat tires and getting lost symbolizes the strength of his bond to her in addition to a renewed sense of self-confidence.

Guns

Guns are a staple of the thriller genre that Patterson writes and are a dominant motif in this novel too, from Ethan’s memories of fighting the war in Afghanistan to the borrowed gun that AnnieLee keeps in her jacket pocket. The idea of a gun in a jacket pocket, close to one’s vital organs, is a symbol of AnnieLee’s instinct to be defensive and her mistrust, which is visible in her early interactions with Ethan. She retaliates explosively when Ruthanna challenges her to get out of Nashville, telling her she “can go screw yourself” (73). Although in the greatest part of the novel AnnieLee is in flight rather than fight mode, the gun symbolizes her impulsive nature and capacity to aggressively defend herself. Interestingly, references to gun violence appear in her song “Firecracker,” in which she warns those who mess with her that she “will blow up in your face right here and right now” (414). It’s as though she wants to use her music to fend off the men who pursue her, even as she’s not yet brave enough to face the past.

Like AnnieLee, Ethan spends the first part of the novel in flight rather than fight mode, trying to fend off memories of the war in Afghanistan and the trouble with his wife. When he does fight, in AnnieLee’s defense, he uses martial arts and boxing moves to get past Mikey’s security guards, indicating that this is nothing like the violence he has seen. Only later, at Clayton’s place, does he get his hands on a gun, a Winchester Model 70 “just like he used to have” (376). The emphasis on Ethan’s borrowing a gun rather than possessing one indicates that he’s not a violent, trigger-happy man by nature; he has left behind his fighting days (which are associated with his negative experiences in Afghanistan) and is using a gun only to save AnnieLee and bring her attackers to justice. Importantly, he doesn’t have to shoot Gus Hobbs to rescue AnnieLee; he merely has to knock him unconscious. This means that the gun is more of a performative tool for Ethan, who doesn’t have to live with the trauma of actually killing someone (after having once been accused of murdering his wife).

Run, Rose, Run

Symbols & Motifs

Guitars

The Road

Guns

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