The Hitchhiker

“ADAMS: But I must speak quickly. At any minute the link with life may break. This may be the last thing I ever tell on earth...the last night I ever see the stars...”

This line foreshadows the eventual reveal that Adams is dead by the time he recites his opening monologue and clues the listener in to the fact that he is in a liminal state. He is experiencing a reality beyond the everyday.

“MOTHER: I know. But you’ll be careful, won’t you. Promise me you’ll be extra careful. Don’t fall asleep—or drive fast—or pick up any strangers on the road…”

Fletcher uses foreshadowing often, and this quote specifically hints at Adams’s upcoming death in a car accident and his following encounters with the play’s antagonist, the odd hitchhiker.

“ADAMS: It’s just eight days of perfectly simple driving on smooth, decent, civilized roads, with a hotdog or a hamburger stand every ten miles…”

Before departing on his trip, Adams is so certain of his safety that he brushes off his mother’s concerns. This line shows that Adams is a self-confident individual who presumes the world to be a generally good place. It is ironic in hindsight, as the “perfectly civilized” trip Adams anticipates turns into a psychological nightmare.

“ADAMS: Crossing Brooklyn Bridge that morning in the rain, I saw a man leaning against the cables. He seemed to be waiting for a lift. There were spots of fresh rain on his shoulders. He was carrying a cheap overnight bag in one hand. He was thin, nondescript, with a cap pulled down over his eyes. He stepped off the walk, and if I hadn’t swerved, I’d have hit him.”

The hitchhiker’s first appearance is so normal that Adams barely takes note of him. The mundanity of their encounter obscures the fact that Adams dies at this very moment. Just like Adams, the listener misses the moment of his death.

“ADAMS: I suppose not. (casually) What about hitchhikers?

MECHANIC: (half laughing). Hitchhikers here?

ADAMS: What’s the matter? Don’t you ever see any?

MECHANIC: Not much. If we did, it’d be a sight for sore eyes.”

This is the first instance in the play that confirms that other characters cannot see the man by the side of the road. Fletcher uses secondary characters to encourage the listener to question Adams’s sanity.

“ADAMS: Let me explain about his appearance before I go on. I repeat. There was nothing sinister about him. He was as drab as a mud fence. Nor was his attitude menacing. He merely stood there, waiting, almost drooping a little, the cheap overnight bag in his hand. He looked as though he had been waiting there for hours.”

Adams specifically notes the hitchhiker’s nonthreatening appearance and demeanor. His seeming mundanity contrasts his logic-defying ability to be everywhere at once, creating an uneasy aura of the unknown within the ordinary.

“VOICE: (closer). Going to California? (sound: starter starting…gears jamming)

ADAMS: (as though sweating blood). No. Not today. The other way. Going to New York. Sorry…sorry…”

Although the hitchhiker looks non-threatening, small details like this, the fact that he knows private information about Adams’s road trip renders him sinister. Vivid stage directions enhance the building feeling of anxiety for listeners who cannot see them on the page, but experience them audibly.

“ADAMS: I had seen him at that roadside stand; I knew I would see him again—perhaps at the next turn of the road. I knew that when I saw him next, I would run him down…”

Adams decides to kill the hitchhiker, a choice which shows his deteriorating state of mind. This moment is rendered humorously ironic when Fletcher reveals that the hitchhiker is Death, and therefore unbeatable.

“ADAMS: The train was coming closer. I could hear its bell ringing, and the cry of its whistle. Still he stood there. And now—I knew that he was beckoning—beckoning me to my death.”

Adams becomes convinced that the hitchhiker is trying to kill him, although nothing about the man’s actions clearly indicates this intention. In the absence of a logical explanation for the man’s actions, Adams erroneously assumes his motivations and perpetuates his own ordeal.

“GIRL: (sharply). No. I didn’t see him that time. And personally, mister, I don’t expect never to see him. All I want to do is to go on living—and I don’t see how I will very long driving with you—”

This moment confirms that no one but Adams can see the hitchhiker, and that his behavior has escalated to the point where it’s alarming to outsiders. He is an unreliable narrator, and the dynamic between himself and secondary characters in the play put the veracity of his story in question. The irony here is that Adams himself is no longer living, and the girl’s observation that she may soon be likewise dead if she remains with Adams foreshadows the story’s main revelation. She may have been more right than she knew.

“ADAMS: I was in the heart of the great Texas prairies. There wasn’t a car on the road after the truck went by. I tried to figure out what to do, how to get hold of myself. If I could find a place to rest. Or even, if I could sleep right here in the car for a few hours, along the side of the road…”

Sleep serves as Adams’s only escape from his nightmarish ordeal. He ardently craves sleep and believes it can save him, foreshadowing the fact that he is close to the extended “sleep” state of death.

“ADAMS: But now he didn’t even wait for me to stop. Unless I drove at 85 miles an hour over those endless roads—he waited for me at every other mile. I would see his figure, shadowless, flitting before me, still in its same attitude, over the cold and lifeless ground, flitting over dried-up rivers, over broken stones cast up by old glacial upheavals, flitting in the pure and cloudless air...”

Near the end of the play, Adams’s sanity is indiscernible as he makes fantastical observations about the hitchhiker that defy logic and reason. His characterization of the landscape as cold and lifeless reflects his distress, while his description of the hitchhiker suggests to readers that the strange man is a ghost, a suspicion that Fletcher will invert on the following page.

“ADAMS: Death of her oldest son, Ronald…? Hey—what is this? What number is this?

MRS. WHITNEY: This is Beechwood 2-0828. It’s all been very sudden. He was killed just six days ago in an automobile accident on the Brooklyn Bridge.”

This moment is the key to the entire narrative, unlocking the secret of Adams’s nightmare and the hitchhiker’s true nature. Mrs. Whitney reveals that Adams has been dead since his first encounter with the hitchhiker—who the listener now knows is the personification of Death. The strange man’s relentless pursuit of Adams finally makes sense, as do all of the inexplicable events Adams has experienced on the road.