Car Crash While Hitchhiking by Denis Johnson

[Tristan Riesen]

            Denis Johnson’s short story Car Crash While Hitchhiking is a story about a drug addicted, neurotic, and even silently hysterical man and his experiences before, during, and after a car crash.  The narrator is really disturbed, and his whole façade, as well as the story he tells, is a disaster you can’t help but watch. 

            From the beginning, there is a ton of self-medicating going on: a salesman who shares his bottle of liquor while driving, who then pops a bottle of amphetamines with the narrator, and then later in a Volkswagen driven by a college guy who hotboxes the car with hashish.  All these drugs combine in the story with Johnson’s poetic writing like a certain kind of high.  They drive on under “great gray brains” feeling a “drifting sensation.”  The salesman is talks about his girlfriend, as well as his wife and kids.  He says he is “gifted with love” – a kind of misguided yet somehow euphoric look at his overindulgent behaviors. 

            We really start to know about the narrator as the car crash starts to take place.  It is a pretty natural reaction for someone in a car crash to scream “No!”  But because the narrator says he sees the car crash coming all along, as if his the drugs and his psychoses gives him some sort of clairvoyance, he sees the family screaming “no” as an act of vicious denial.  The more the story goes on, the more hypnotic the narrator’s statements become.  He says he feels “relieved and tearful” for the truck driver choosing not to do anything about the wreck.  The narrator says of the man who was about to die, “…he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”  All of these ominous and hallucinogenic statements used by the narrator gave me the feeling of a bad trip, and I think that’s what the narrator was having, but a real bad trip.

            A very strange view of life and death are themes throughout the story, are big themes.  When the death of her husband is revealed to the woman, instead of feeling sad or empathetic towards her, the narrator actually just acknowledge her lung power and her scream.  “It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it!  I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”  And by the end of the story, I felt as if the narrator continues to look for that feeling to this day, amongst us.