54 pages • 1 hour read
Volkswagen Blues
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Chapters 18-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary: “The Oregon Trail”
Jack and La Grande Sauterelle drive west, using The Oregon Trail Revisited to retrace the route established by the wagon caravans in the 1840s. The book not only guides them to the roads that follow the trail, but also quotes “passages from diaries the emigrants had kept during their journey” (121). While one of them drives, the other relates information from the book in such a way as to recreate scenes of wagons traveling the trail and weary emigrants stopping to camp for the night.
As Jack drives and the girl reads, he reflects on how intensely “she loved books and words” (124). She once made a remarkable observation about books that he now remembers: “A book is never complete in itself; to understand it you must put it in relation to other books, not just books by the same author, but also books written by other people” (124).
During their overnight stay in North Platte, Nebraska, they visit the Buffalo Bill Museum. When they learn that William F. Cody earned his nickname by slaughtering thousands of buffalo for the Northern Pacific Railroad, Jack realizes “that Buffalo Bill, like his brother’s other heroes and his brother himself, was about to come under fire” (125) from La Grande Sauterelle. Anticipating her anger, Jack denounces Buffalo Bill’s crimes against the Indigenous people before she can, and she, in turn, concedes that “not everything Buffalo Bill had done was bad” (125).
That night, Jack wakes the girl from a fitful nightmare of white men shooting buffalo for sport in the 19th century. There were nearly 60 million buffalo living on the prairies before the whites arrived. The indigenous people depended on them for all their needs and hunted the animals with honor and moderation, using everything, from the hide to the bones to the blood. The whites carelessly killed the buffalo, and, the girl adds bitterly, “the extermination of the buffalo meant the disappearance of the Plains Indians” (127).
Chapter 19 Summary: “They Died with Their Dreams”
La Grande Sauterelle drives, while Jack, looking at The Oregon Trail Revisited, fashions a narrative of the 19th-century emigrants’ journey that runs parallel to their own, as if in real time. Thus, Jack reports, the emigrants have a guide named Théo, “who spoke French […] [and] could communicate with the Indians” (132). Moreover, “it’s Théo who decides […] where we ford a river, how we fix a broken axle, […] how we interpret signs along the trail […]. Look, he’s just galloped by on his horse. Did you see?” (133). Théo knows that the terrain becomes challenging as they approach Ash Hollow, so he forewarns the emigrants, who are just “ordinary people,” not heroes. They are not looking for adventure, Jack explains, and then he offers, “What they’re looking for, basically, is happiness” (134).
Jack and the girl arrive at Ash Hollow campground, located in a tree-filled valley that constitutes an oasis in the barren Nebraska countryside. As they hike up the steep slope from the campground, they “see the ruts left by the emigrants’ wagon wheels” (137) as the caravans navigated the treacherous descent. They visit an old cemetery and read, in their book, that of the 300,000 people who emigrated along the Oregon Trail, 30,000 “died en route, with their dreams” (137).
Chapter 20 Summary: “The Bull Rider’s Wife”
Chimney Rock “stood 150 metres high,” and “[w]hen emigrants spotted the long narrow stone chimney in the distance, they knew that they must soon brave the Rocky Mountains” (139). Upon arriving at the entrance to the monument, Jack and the girl meet a tall, blonde woman who lives on the premises and provides tourist information. She warmly welcomes them and then, studying Jack, decides he looks familiar.
They leave the friendly blonde to visit the monument, and La Grande Sauterelle confesses that the reporter in Independence recommended talking with that very woman, should they travel to Chimney Rock. He said “that she was a bull rider’s wife, that she was very special and that if Théo had passed by, […] she would remember him” (142). After they drive back to the woman’s mobile home, Jack asks if she has met his brother, whom he resembles to some extent. The woman recognizes Théo’s name, and “when she talked about him, there was such warmth in her voice and so much light in her face, that it was as if Jack’s brother had been absolved” of the suspicions that shadowed his trail west (144).
The bull rider’s wife talks about the rattlesnakes that overrun Chimney Rock, and then, reflecting again on Théo, she says he left after a two-day stay but “wasn’t sure if he was going to Oregon or California” (145). She adds that he seemed to be “running away from something” (145).
Chapter 21 Summary: “Sheriff Waterman”
Jack and the girl drive two hours west and stop at Scott’s Bluff, which “was renowned for the ruts left by the emigrants’ wagons” (148). It’s the museum that draws them, however, and in particular the visitor registry. To gain access to old registers, which requires authorization, La Grande Sauterelle whispers to the young girl at the desk that Jack is “Sheriff Waterman.” Imagining the sheriff is tracking a “dangerous outlaw,” the girl sets out the collection of old registers for them to search, but they don’t find Théo’s name.
Outside the museum, an abandoned wagon—or “prairie schooner”—marks the spot where the wagon ruts begin and then continue for several kilometers. Jack and the girl walk in the ruts, speaking very little and only in hushed voices, “[a]s if they were in a church, a cemetery, a sacred place” (149). Finally, Jack stops and says quietly, “This is like Théo’s trail […]. It’s something that almost doesn’t exist” (149).
Chapter 22 Summary: “The Gatling Gun”
When La Grande Sauterelle suggests that they “pay a little visit to Fort Laramie” in Wyoming, Jack is surprised, as the girl has often expressed contempt for the military, “for the American cavalry and for the Seventh Regiment” of the American cavalry, in particular (150). The girl explains that Fort Laramie was originally a trading post, established in 1818 by a French fur trapper. Indeed, at that time, the West was teeming with “French Canadians who worked as coureurs de bois, trappers and guides” (151). She also wants to visit because it is the site of an 1854 Indigenous massacre.
La Grande Sauterelle draws the attention of other tourists at Fort Laramie when she sees a Gatling Gun on display and begins shouting. A ranger quickly appears, and the girl, pointing at the early machine gun, howls, “I WANT TO KNOW IF IT WAS USED TO SHOOT INDIANS!” (152). The ranger calmly opens “the fort commandant’s diary” (152), also on display, and reads that the weapon was completely useless because the ammunition jammed it. The girl laughs with relief, and “there was some applause” from other tourists (153).
That afternoon, however, the girl breaks into another “sudden storm” and tells Jack of the 1864 carnage at Sand Creek. Intending to make peace with the white people, Chief Black Kettle assembled 500 Cheyennes at Sand Creek in Colorado. The white people descended on the peaceful gathering, and although the Indigenous waved white flags and American flags, over 100 of them were killed.
After dinner, “there was another storm, briefer this time,” as the girl recounts a massacre in 1868 (154). While the Cheyenne were camped along the Washita River, General Custer and the Seventh Regiment of the US Cavalry launched an attack. They slaughtered another 100 Indigenous people, including Chief Black Kettle, who had “done his best to persuade other chiefs that they must seek peace” (154).
The girl goes for a walk and returns to tell about the final bloodbath of the Indian Wars in 1890, at Wounded Knee. The Seventh Regiment fired machine guns on the Sioux, killing 180 people. La Grande Sauterelle concedes that Indigenous people killed white people, too, but mainly after 1849, when the gold rush began. A wave of adventurers flooded the West then, and most “had no respect for anyone or anything,” which provoked the Indigenous people's anger (156).
Chapters 18-22 Analysis
In Chapters 18 and 19, the narrative does double duty as it presents La Grande Sauterelle and Jack traveling the Oregon Trail while they narrate the progress of the 19th-century emigrants along the same trail. By relating the emigrants’ adventures as if they are coinciding with their own in the present, Jack and the girl collapse the time and space between themselves and those 19th-century voyagers. They thus identify themselves with the emigrants. Indeed, Jack and the girl develop an affection and affinity for the white, largely Anglo emigrants, as demonstrated by their respectful demeanor while walking along the wheel ruts and visiting the cemetery at Ash Hollow. Although separated from the emigrants by culture and ethnicity, Jack and the girl identify with them because they are seeking the same thing: “What they’re looking for, basically, is happiness,” Jack explains (134).
For both Jack and the girl, finding happiness hinges on establishing their identities. Jack is uncertain who he is because he has lived by proxy through his brother and his writing and thus neglected his own life. La Grande Sauterelle, on the other hand, struggles to determine which community she belongs to, that of her white father or that of her Indigenous mother. In these chapters, she becomes increasingly outraged over the atrocities committed by Europeans against the indigenous people of North America. Her fury is so visceral that it seems born from personal pain, suggesting she strongly identifies with the Indigenous people. Moreover, the narrative refers to the girl as “La Grande Sauterelle,” but when she inscribes her name—as she does in the Scott’s Bluff museum registry, or on notes she sends to libraries—she self-identifies using her Montagnais name, “Pitsémine.”
Names are words, of course, and words are signs for things and phenomena, real or imagined. The idea that a word directly connects a thing—or referent—with a single, unitary meaning came under fire in the late 20th century. By the 1980s, postmodernism, the intellectual and cultural movement associated with these upheavals in linguistic theory, was reshaping Canadian (and, indeed, Western) artistic thinking and expression.
“Undecidability” is a key concept in postmodernism, and there are traces of it throughout Volkswagen Blues, not just with respect to identity, but with respect to words themselves. The word “girl”—frequently invoked in the novel—does not correspond to any single, definite referent; rather, it is rich with meanings that, in turn, invoke other words, which lead to other words, and so on. As the word “girl” never settles on a final, fixed referent, its meaning is fundamentally undecidable and thus fragmented, not unified. This condition of fragmentation applies to all words and to collections of words, like novels, as the girl acknowledges when she asserts that “a book is never complete in itself” (124). It is only a fragment—“only part of another, vaster book that a number of authors have collaborated on without knowing it” (125).
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