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4. Duchess (2)
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
The story flashes back to provide Woolly’s perspective on the visit to the Empire State Building. His travels with his family have taught him that every destination features a few landmarks which must be visited, so he is excited when he sees the Empire State Building. He resents the tone Duchess takes when he allows the group to go to the Empire State Building, recognizing it as the tone of someone who wants to “set him straight.” Woolly is satisfied when the boys discover Abernathe is a real person and Duchess is the one who is set straight.
Woolly is familiar with people and institutions assuming he is incompetent and intending to “set him straight,” and he recognizes when Duchess takes on that role. This once again highlights the inequality in Woolly and Duchess’s relationship and also hints that Woolly is to some extent aware of this. Woolly is not insecure about the unique way he sees the world, but he does resent the way people treat him because of it.
Themes
Billy leads Duchess, Woolly, and Abernathe to the railroad camp, and Woolly pauses to appreciate the wildflowers growing on the edge of the city. They find Ulysses, who (at Billy’s request) tells Abernathe about his wife and his time at war. Ulysses adds that he has lived without hope for years until meeting Billy, who told him about the mythical Ulysses and gave Ulysses hope that he might see his family again. Abernathe explains that since the universe is infinite, some people across millennia likely share the exact same experiences. Thus, Ulysses’s life might be “an echo of the life of the Great Ulysses,” so he might reunite with his wife and son the way the mythical Ulysses did.
Billy and Abernathe’s conversation with Ulysses demonstrates how stories can have a tangible impact on the people who receive them. Ulysses is not only rejuvenated by the story of “the Great Ulysses,” but Abernathe suggests that Ulysses’s life has taken the shape of that story without him knowing. If this is the case, then Billy telling Ulysses the story of his namesake allows Ulysses to learn the true nature of his own life. The truth embedded in Billy’s stories is what gives them their power.
Themes
Abernathe adds that in the story of Ulysses, Ulysses escaped the curse of the gods by paying tribute to them. In the original story, Ulysses must carry an oar far enough from the sea that someone does not know what it is. The Ulysses of 1954 finds a railroad spike, and Abernathe suggests he carry it until someone unfamiliar with railroads asks what it is. Later, when Billy bids farewell to Ulysses, he gives Ulysses his pendant of St. Christopher.
Billy idealizes travel and adventure as a glamorous endeavor. For Ulysses, though, adventure is a burden: a task he must undertake until he has properly atoned. Abernathe’s advice has given Ulysses’s adventure a direction, so that he can go forward with a clear goal rather than traveling aimlessly.
Themes
