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8. Emmett (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
Duchess and Woolly spend the night in a Howard Johnson’s outside of Chicago. Woolly is well-travelled, but he has never visited a Howard Johnson’s, so he is entranced by what Duchess considers commonplace. In their room, Duchess continues to entertain Woolly with stories of Leonello’s. When he gets $50,000, Duchess tells Woolly, Duchess will open his own version of Leonello’s. He imagines traveling to California with Emmett and Billy and opening a restaurant in Los Angeles. He decides that Emmett is right about the importance of a fresh start, and concludes that before he can start over, he has one debt to repay and two to collect.
Duchess’s stories are not inherently bad; in this instance, his visions of the Italian restaurant he will open entertain both himself and Woolly. However, those stories are still ultimately in service of Duchess’s goal to keep Woolly on board with his planned heist. Duchess’s dream of traveling with Emmett and Billy also highlights that Duchess doesn’t consider his theft of Emmett’s car a personal betrayal. He took the Studebaker because he wanted it, and he doesn’t see why that should affect his relationship with Emmett. This self-centered attitude starts to come to a head as Duchess plans to settle his debts.
Themes
