47 pages • 1 hour read
The Wayward Bus
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Stasis of Human Existence
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to domestic abuse, sexualization of racial “otherness,” sexual assault, self-harm, and depression.
In The Wayward Bus, Steinbeck’s title suggests the stasis of human existence. Each character in this novel wants something about their life to change, but their lack of character development proves that the tension between external and internal conflicts keeps them from progressing with their lives.
Juan Chicoy intentionally forces the bus into a ditch to escape a life that feels similarly stuck. He is unhappy in his marriage, bored with his job, and longs for his childhood in Mexico with homesickness. He wants to be free and believes that he can achieve freedom and happiness by running away. However, Juan doesn’t trust his feelings. Instead, he uncharacteristically relies on the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe to send him a sign: “If she felt strongly about his going back to Alice, she would smooth the road and get the bus through, and he would know that he was set for life with what he had” (193). Juan manipulates his belief in Our Lady of Guadalupe because he is desperate to get away from his life while simultaneously and subconsciously aware that he will likely not make the move away from Alice and to Mexico. Juan takes the first steps to run away, but he feels empty upon reaching the abandoned farmhouse and, after his brief tryst with Mildred, ultimately returns to the bus and his life with Alice. Despite his fantasy of freedom, Juan’s life remains in stasis.
Mildred Pritchard is another static character who is bored of her life, finding it too normative and typical. Eager to engage with the world and be politically active, Mildred hopes that by meeting interesting people and having adventures, she’ll become a different woman than her mother and experience the freedom that her father gave up as “youthful folly.” Mildred is attracted to and has sex with Juan because she finds his Mexican heritage titillating and edgy. Ultimately, however, sex with Juan doesn’t change Mildred, and while she doesn’t explicitly realize it, her attempts to find adventure through sex parallel her father’s activities. She is in the process of learning that she can’t help who she is and that other young people feel as unmoored as she does.
The physical settings in the novel also help to symbolically develop this theme. The road the wayward bus travels is described as worn down by society:
The rubber-shod trucks, the pounding automobiles, beat the concrete, and after a while the life went out of it and it began to crumble. Then a side broke off and a hole crushed through and a crack developed and a little ice in the winter spread the crack, so the resisting concrete could not stand the beating of rubber and broke down (123).
This road is a metaphorical representation of the characters in stasis. Just as the external world beats down the usefulness of the road, so too does external society restrict people from fulfilling their potential, keeping them forever in a cycle in which they can’t change themselves or their situation.
People’s Resentful Dependence on One Another
In The Wayward Bus, characters are tied to one another in ways that are both necessary to their identity and the causes of their resentment.
Elliott Pritchard defines himself by the appearance of his idyllic life. He has financial stability, success in business, a daughter, and a dutiful wife. Elliott is the picture of conservative capitalistic America, but he isn’t happy. His dependence on Bernice as a symbol of his success and happiness is also the source of his lack of autonomy. He resents Bernice for not being overtly sexual and for being boring, even though those are the very qualities that he also needs from her. Elliott’s rape of his wife is a brutal reflection of his resentment that his life is tied to hers. His secret internal feelings of worthlessness mean that he needs the love of his wife to feel good about himself, but the love of Bernice and his stable life are not enough to make him truly happy and secure. Therefore, Elliott uses sexual violence to express his resentful dependence on Bernice.
Society is also responsible for the tension inherent in this theme. Individuality is censored in favor of being part of the status quo for social acceptance. Elliott ensures that his life is perceived as normal by his participation in groupthink: “[T]he people in his group watched one another. Any variation from a code of conduct was first noted, then discussed. A man who varied was not a sound man, and if he persisted no one would do business with him” (36-37). While this is a heightened concern for Elliott, this is true for all the characters. They are each self-conscious about the way the world perceives them and the difference between that perception and their self-perception. The conflict between the internal and external is, therefore, a symbiotic relationship between people living in society that breeds resentment. Rather than criticize the foundations of this culture, people blame one another. For example, when Camille doesn’t succumb to the men on the bus who try to seduce her, the men defensively dismiss her as a “tramp.” It’s easier for them to blame Camille than to analyze why they believe they can possess her in the first place.
Alice and Juan are also in a marriage of dependence that is both necessary to their existence and the source of their unhappiness. Alice is desperate in her love for Juan, so much so that she self-medicates with alcohol and is cruel to other women. Juan is buoyed by Alice’s obsessive love for him, but he also resents her as the person who holds him back from being free: They can’t live with one another, and they can’t live without one another. This is the ultimate dilemma for the characters in The Wayward Bus: Other people are both necessary and oppressive.
Dreams, Ambitions, and Fantasies as Escape
In The Wayward Bus, characters are defined by dreams, ambitions, and fantasies that provide a means of escape from realities they find unpleasant.
Norma is a lonely young woman who fantasizes about a life with a Hollywood actor, Clark Gable. This fantasy serves as her sole outlet for companionship. As Norma works, “you could know that in that secret garden in her head, Gable had just entered the restaurant, had gasped when he saw her, and had stood there, his lips slightly parted and in his eyes the recognition that this was his woman” (11). Norma’s internal fantasy life is more interesting and stimulating than her real life. While Norma attempts to form connections with Camille and Pimples, Steinbeck implies that these friendships of circumstance will not last beyond the journey.
Ernest Horton is also defined by his ambitions, which contradict that which society tells him he “should” want and thus serve as an escape from the status quo. Ernest enjoys his solitary life on the road, even though he tells other people that he would like a stable wife and home. Ernest also enjoys his business, as his ambition to make money and invent his own products maintains his transient lifestyle. Ernest doesn’t need the trappings of society’s expectations of happiness. For Ernest, working toward his goal to create his suit and to be successful on his own, independent of larger corporate cultures, gives him enough happiness.
Juan dreams of escaping his stable yet boring life and starting anew in Mexico. Juan craves freedom, and he believes he can only achieve freedom by radically separating himself from his life in Rebel Corners. However, when Juan gets a small taste of freedom after walking away from the bus, he realizes that he doesn’t feel the way he thought he would: “[H]e had felt, in anticipation, a bursting, orgasmic delight of freedom. But it was not so. He felt miserable. […] He wondered, ‘Won’t I ever be happy? Isn’t there anything to do?’” (212). Juan’s fantasy escape is rooted in unhappiness, but he ultimately finds that what he thought he wanted doesn’t feel as good as he imagined because he still carries the burdens of worry for Alice and guilt over leaving her.
In The Wayward Bus, characters have dreams, ambitions, and fantasies, but for most characters, these dreams are a means of escaping from realities they find stifling or uncomfortable. Instead, they serve as pipe dreams, secret internal conflicts to hold onto and nurture while they continue to live their normal, realistic lives.
Unlock all 47 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By John Steinbeck
