Previous
9. Duchess
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 Duchess and Emmett are in town, Woolly is alone in the house with Billy, watching the boy read a book that contains a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Woolly prefers this version to the original novel, which he finds overly long and boring. Billy asks if life at Salina was as difficult as the story’s protagonist’s life was in his prison, and Woolly explains that the hardest part of life at Salina was its monotony. Woolly also struggled with monotony at the various boarding schools his family sent him to.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a novel about a man who sets out to take revenge on those who have wronged him, which speaks to the novel’s theme of settling debts and foreshadows the mission Duchess will take on later in the story. Woolly’s comparison between Salina and his boarding schools also makes clear that he is a product of American institutions. When he failed to thrive in the educational institution, he was sent to the carceral institution of Salina.
Themes
Woolly flashes back to the first time he repeated his junior year of high school. He takes a taxi from school to visit his sister Sarah, who is the only member of the family who understands him. When her husband Dennis comes home and complains that she hasn’t made dinner for him, Woolly realizes that the monotony of boarding schools is intended to prepare young men for the monotony of upper-middle-class life. Back in 1954, Woolly tells Billy that he yearns for a “one-of-a-kind day.”
Like Billy, Woolly yearns for adventure. He has been prepared for a specific lifestyle that he doesn’t want, and he wants to break free from that monotony. Additionally, Dennis’s expectation that Sarah will have dinner prepared for him echoes Sally’s role as a cook for the men of the story and speaks to the limiting expectations of women in the 1950s.
Themes
