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1. Emmett
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Lincoln Highway, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Stories, Truth, and Lies
Debts and Atonement
Maturity and Responsibility
Adventure
Pride vs. Humility
Summary
Analysis
Emmett checks Sally and Billy into a motel for them to spend the night while he tracks down Duchess and Woolly. Sally tells Emmett she wants to go with him to California, and Emmett awkwardly tells her that he doesn’t want to encourage her “expectations” of their relationship. Sally, exasperated, responds that she doesn’t want to go to California for Emmett; she wants to go to start a life of her own, independent from her father.
Emmett reduces Sally to the stereotypically feminine roles of a caregiver for Billy and love interest for himself. He doesn’t consider that she might want to help him out of kindness or friendship, instead assuming that she has “expectations” of romance that he is uninterested in. Sally’s actual goals, though, align with those of many of the book’s male characters: she wants independence and adventure.
Themes
Emmett leaves, and Sally recalls a day when Billy’s principal called her to complain that Billy had refused to participate in a duck-and-cover drill. In a flashback to that day, Billy argues that a hero faces danger head-on instead of hiding from it, and Sally agrees. She stands up to the principal, and he appoints Billy “Duck-and-Cover Monitor,” so he can check the other classrooms during drills instead of hiding under his desk. Back in 1954, Sally looks for Billy and finds he has run away from the motel.
Sally’s participation in Billy’s schooling makes clear that Sally has helped raise Billy just as much as Emmett has, if not more so, yet Emmett still resents her help when it extends beyond traditionally feminine duties. Unlike Emmett, Sally encourages Billy’s passion for heroics. Her success in standing up to the principal shows that the systems that rendered Woolly’s dreams of adventure hopeless are not invincible.
Themes
