The Lincoln Highway: 7. Ulysses Summary & Analysis

Ulysses looks at Billy with sympathy, estimating him to be the age of Ulysses’s own son. Ulysses explains that he rides the rails alone, but he will help Billy leave the train when it slows. Billy ignores Ulysses’s offer of help and asks if Ulysses left his wife and child behind to fight in a war. When Ulysses is unnerved, Billy shows him his book of heroes, which explains the story of the Odyssey. In the story, Odysseus (also known as Ulysses) leaves Greece to fight in the Trojan War and spends a decade trying to return home to his family. As Billy tells him the story, Ulysses feels like he is hearing his own name for the first time, and he weeps.

The story flashes back to 1939, when Ulysses first meets the woman who becomes his wife. Ulysses is not called to serve in the first years of World War II, and he chooses to stay at home for his wife, especially after she becomes pregnant. But as years pass and his neighbors lose loved ones in the war, Ulysses grows ashamed of his cowardice and decides to enlist. His wife tells him that she will leave him if he goes to war, and when he returns from combat in 1945, he finds that she and their son are gone. Since then, Ulysses has been riding the rails, never staying in one place.

Back in the train car in 1954, Ulysses stops Billy from finishing the story, asserting that his hardship will have no end. Billy insists that Ulysses only has to wait two more years, and then his decade of traveling will conclude and he can reunite with his family like the Greek Ulysses. Ulysses feels that his actions on the battlefield offended Christ, and that the loss of his family is his penance for his sins, but Billy’s story disrupts Ulysses’s conviction in that belief. Ulysses grants Billy permission to stay with him on the train. Emmett returns to the train car and is immediately hostile to Ulysses, who in turn stands to defend Billy. Billy deescalates the situation and introduces the men to each other.