Previous
9. 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
Like Duchess, Sally narrates her chapters from a 1st person perspective. She reflects on a Bible story in which Jesus rejects the prayers of a woman asking for help tending to her household. Though Sally is a devoted Christian, she believes this story proves the Bible was written by men. Women’s work is time-consuming, old-fashioned, and often unnecessary, but she values all these qualities, since they speak to the effort and care she puts into her work. Unnecessary acts, Sally believes, are gestures of kindness. She does not need to make pie or preserves for the Watsons, and that lack of necessity is what makes the act kind.
Sarah and Duchess are the only characters who narrate their perspectives in the first person, and that narrative similarity highlights the contrast between their characters. Both assert their own stories with confidence, but Sally’s strong-willed and opinionated nature does not translate to Duchess’s selfishness. She values kindness even when others ridicule her for it. Sally also resents men’s treatment of femininity, but she doesn’t resent femininity itself. In fact, she values it as much as she values kindness, demonstrating that she forms her own opinions of the world and her place in it.
Themes
