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2. Woolly
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
While Abacus Abernathe travels with Ulysses, he thinks about the nature of heroes, who achieve great things before their lives reach a “fixed point” and begin to limit the possibilities of what they will do before they die. He comes to realize that all lives follow this path, including his own, and the story flashes back to Abacus’s youth. He is named Sam as a child, and he develops a fascination with shipwrecks by accompanying his father on his work as an insurance adjuster. From this interest in shipwrecks comes a passion for the stories of explorers. As he grows up, he attends Harvard, marries a woman, and has children. His life begins to diminish after his wife dies, but he finds himself revitalized when Billy arrives with his “fantastical tale.” Ulysses interrupts Abacus’s train of thought and urges him onward.
Although he loves stories as much as Billy, Abacus is older and less idealistic. He recognizes that heroic narratives are constrained within the limits of life and death, and facing that reality of as he ages has decreased Abacus’s faith in those narratives. But his encounter with Billy comes when Abacus is an old man, which challenges his assumption that the exciting part of his life is over. Just as Billy inspired Ulysses, Billy’s passion for stories inspires Abacus to reimagine what his future might look like. Now, the two men can then take their futures into their own hands.
Themes
