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.
Themes
The Inevitability of Death
In “The Hitchhiker,” the titular character is a personification of Death who follows Adams across America. The hitchhiker’s unflagging pursuit of Adams represents the central theme of Fletcher’s play: that death is the natural, unavoidable conclusion of the human experience, and there is no sense in trying to outrun fate.
Adams first encounters the hitchhiker at the moment of his death, when he swerves to avoid hitting the man and causes the accident that ends his life. This moment plays into the idea that avoiding Death is pointless. In trying to do just that, Adams seals his fate and ensures that the hitchhiker will follow him for the rest of his trip.
Although relentless in his attempts to meet Adams, the hitchhiker is also calm and amiable. He never runs, yells, or displays aggression. He is in no rush to catch Adams out because Adams’s flight is futile. When the hitchhiker appears across a set of train tracks, Adams decides that the man is trying to lure him to his death, but he’s mistaken—having died on the Brooklyn bridge, he has no life left to lose. Death has already won their cat-and-mouse game and is only waiting for Adams to resign and willingly depart the world of the living.
As Adams grows increasingly panicked and erratic, speeding up his driving, the hitchhiker remains as calm as ever, gliding easily along to keep pace with Adams’s car. Their contrasting demeanors highlight the fact that Adams’s attempts to escape Death are doomed to fail. Death is inexhaustible and omnipresent, and Adams cannot keep running forever. Even Adams knows this, as demonstrated by the final line of the play, when he states that “[s]omewhere among [the stars], he is waiting for me. Somewhere I shall know who he is, and who...I...am...” (101). Adams is aware that he cannot dodge Death forever and will soon have to come face-to-face with the hitchhiker.
By characterizing Death as an ordinary and friendly-seeming man, Fletcher suggests that dying is not inherently bad. The hitchhiker isn’t trying to hurt Adams. Indeed, no physical harm can be done to Adams after he dies in his accident. Adams projects his fears of being harmed or killed onto the hitchhiker’s strange but neutral actions, and this projection drives him to misery and the brink of insanity. If he were to surrender and go with the man, he could end his terrified flight, but his desire to cling to life and resist the unknown keeps him in limbo, as indicated when the female hitchhiker can see Adams and is able to enter his vehicle. He clearly still has a material connection to the world of the living.
Likewise, humans’ fear of the natural process of death causes us more misery than if we were able to accept it. No matter how desperately we try to avoid it, death will always have the final word. With “The Hitchhiker,” Fletcher reminds listeners that each one of us will one day have to answer to our own version of the man on the side of the road, and he suggests that perhaps it is wise to stop for him when the time comes.
How Perception Shapes Reality
Throughout “The Hitchhiker,” Adams’s road trip goes from lighthearted adventure to terrifying cat-and-mouse game. Although his surroundings do not fundamentally change much, his evolving perception of his own situation dictates the way he processes the world around him. Fletcher uses repetitive imagery and descriptive language to show how Adams’s mindset shapes his reality, changing the world of the play from familiar and safe to cold and unknown.
Adams begins his road trip in high spirits. He describes the “peaceful [...] fields” of Ohio “dreaming in the golden light” (96), his positive descriptors mirroring his upbeat attitude. After the hitchhiker starts haunting him, his characterization of his surroundings changes. He begins to resent the emptiness of the rural landscapes he passes through, describing them as desolate, “cold and lifeless” (100). Even the starry night sky, an ordinarily beautiful sight, is “soulless” to Adams, who can only think of the hitchhiker waiting in the darkness.
Adams’s mindset affects not only his subjective perceptions but the core of his reality. The play’s big reveal occurs on the final page when Adams learns that he is dead. Before this moment, Adams is unaware of his death, and the play gives no indication to the listener when he dies at the moment he swerves to avoid the hitchhiker. One factor that throws listeners off the scent of this twist is Adams’s ability to interact seamlessly with secondary characters in the play. He has conversations with several third parties, including a mechanic, a shopkeeper, and a female hitchhiker. Although the shopkeeper and the female hitchhiker think he’s crazy, none of the other characters treat Adams like anything but a living, opaque human being.
The apparent key factor allowing Adams to maintain contact with the living world is that he doesn’t know he is dead. He takes it for granted that he is alive, and he continues to interact with the world like a living person and not like a ghost. The call that informs him of his death is his last moment of contact with another human character in the play. In the final paragraph, Adams is cast out into a sort of liminal space created by the understanding that he is no longer alive, and it’s unclear whether he can continue interacting normally with living people.
As the entirety of “The Hitchhiker” is told from Adams’s perspective, the audience is torn along with him on his descent into terror and possibly madness. We know that Adams is an unreliable narrator due to the reactions of characters like the shopkeeper and the female hitchhiker, who cannot see the mysterious man haunting Adams. These encounters indicate that the reality he’s experiencing is different from the truth of the wider world, but as the sole narrator, he is also our only first-hand access to the narrative. Just as Adams’s distorted vision of the world becomes his inescapable ordeal, it becomes the listener’s reality as well. With no outside perspectives or source of objective truth, we are forced to accept Adams’s version of events as he tells it.
By the end of “The Hitchhiker,” the laws of normal reality have shifted, opening up a strange world where Adams can exist somewhere between life and afterlife. Fletcher doesn’t clarify exactly what exactly is real, but ultimately the only things that matter are the events Adams experiences and relates back to the listener. By bringing the reader into Adams’s waking nightmare, “The Hitchhiker” serves as a testament to the power of the mind in shaping reality.
The Corruption of the Mundane
A popular theme in horror is the ordinary gone wrong: a familiar person, place or situation distorting beyond recognition. There’s something fundamentally terrifying about being alienated from what you once loved. Fletcher taps into this fear in “The Hitchhiker” when Adams finds himself living a twisted version of his everyday life.
Though authors often model characters after themselves, Fletcher makes the deliberate choice of presenting protagonist Adams as a quintessential everyman. Adams is a 36-year-old, single, presumably white man in the 1940s. He assumes that an eight-day road trip across the USA will be perfectly safe, a reasonable assumption in the context of his time. The idea of “stranger danger” didn’t gain popularity until the 1980s, and a man like Adams would have enjoyed the privilege of presuming the best in others. Adams casually strikes up conversations with strangers on the road and even boldly wakes up a shop owner in the middle of the night, unafraid of repercussion. The landscape he is traversing is a familiar one, with recognizable city landmarks and cozy small towns grounding the listener in an identifiable America.
Fletcher uses Adams’s narration to establish a sense of ease and confidence, so when the mundanity of his surroundings is disrupted by the threatening hitchhiker, the shift in tone heightens the play’s suspense. As Adams flees, the landscape seems to darken, the loneliness of the roads and the obscurity of the night sky compounding his fear. The familiar details that situated listeners in the story morph into austere, threatening versions of themselves. The hitchhiker himself provides a clear example of the ordinary becoming the stuff of nightmares, as he makes a harmless first impression before proceeding to chase Adams to the brink of sanity.
The ultimate manifestation of this theme occurs when Adams attempts to call his mother, seeking comfort in the closeness of a family tie. Instead, he is informed that his mother is in the hospital due to a breakdown caused by his death. He no longer exists to her and has no way to make contact. The safety and affirmation of his closest relationship is severed. Cut off from love and support, Adams begins to recognize himself as the ghost that he has unknowingly been for most of the play.
Over the course of the play’s six-day period, Adams goes from an ordinary man on a pleasant drive to a phantom inhabiting a waking nightmare. The change in tone strengthens the play’s effectiveness as a psychological thriller by eroding the listener’s sense of comfort with the implication that even the people and places we trust most may one day turn against us.
