Week 7 - Car Crash While Hitchhiking by Denis Johnson

[Shane Nelson]

[Sasha Liane]

Sasha Cruver

Car Crash While Hitch-hiking Response

11/7/12

I loved this story and hated it at the same time.  A longtime friend died in a car accident a couple of months ago, and it's just a little touchy.  However, I liked the story-telling aspect of Car Crash While Hitch-Hiking.  There is a little back story, but only enough to get the feel of what this character is like.  Drugs, homelessness, adventurousness.  Even before the line "I didn't care if I was alive or dead" [paraphrased, i believe], I could tell the sentiment behind the character's actions.  There was some discussion between some of our classmates a few days ago, as to whether he could predict the future or not.  I don't believe that he could--I just think he was so drugged out that he thought he could.  His perception was messed up, and when things happened, he thought he knew they were going to happen before they did.

However, I really appreciated the imagery in this piece.  I loved the part about the windshield wipers standing up and laying down, and how it did no good.  I'm not sure if there is a metaphor hidden in there, or if the author meant anything by it, but if you have ever been caught out in rain like that, you know exactly what it meant, without the need for an obvious statement like "the windshield wipers were useless".  I also appreciated the phrasing in the author's description of the man hanging out of his door like a trapeze act.  In TV shows and movies, car accidents are "too pretty" most of the time, in the fact that people generally stay in their cars, in one piece, with a little cut or some bruises, or that when people "die" in those circumstances, it's like sleeping beauty.  The person is just snoozing away, no awareness of any harm that has come to them.  But in Car Crash, the man is hanging out of his window, and the wife responds accordingly when she is told he has died.  This was a very pungent piece to read, but to quote I'm-not-quite-sure-who, "to paint a pretty picture you have to use dark colors too".  I think this type of piece is necessary for dealing with the world and more writers should aspire to such realism.

[Shane Nelson]

Shane Nelson

November 6, 2012

English 151, Wyman, 10am

Week 7, weekly response

 

Car Crash While Hitchhiking by Denis Johnson

      I found Denis Johnson’s Car Crash While Hitchhiking to be an interesting and moderately easy read.  Johnson tells the story of a hitchhiker sharing drugs and alcohol with various drivers who pick him up while traveling in the Midwestern United States.  A family of four pick him up in the rain, soaking wet and impaired by amphetamines, weed and alcohol.  He accepts the ride despite his belief that an accident will happen.  Ironically, the father of the family, and driver, comments on how slow he’ll drive to keep his family safe.  he family car is involved in a terrible crash on a bridge.  The driver of the other car is mortally wounded, as are perhaps the other passengers and the adults in the family car with the hitchhiker.  Carrying the apparently unharmed baby from the family’s wrecked car, the hitchhiker seeks help from other drivers.   Soon help arrives and the story moves to the hospital where the wife from the family car seems powerful in her lack of knowledge that her husband is dead. 

The story flashes forward to a detox unit at a Seattle hospital where the hitchhiker is experiencing hallucinations, being drugged, and wondering how anyone could imagine they could depend upon him.  After he is medicated, perhaps hallucinating that he is back at the accident scene he thinks, “It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”  While at the accident scene too, he expresses relief at the idea of not being required to act, to do anything.  “I was relieved and tearful.  I’d thought something was required of me, but I hadn’t wanted to find out what it was,” and “My secret was that in this short while I had gone from being the president of this tragedy to being a faceless onlooker at a gory wreck.”  The hitchhiker is unwilling or unable to be proactive, to try to assist at the accident and is relieved when he learns he isn’t expected to.

     The author graphically details the injuries and last moments of several of the crash victims.  The dark, rainy locale and late night isolation help set the mood leading up to the violent, shocking crash.  The author uses excellent descriptions of a person in shock, the rain of blood and the driver’s mashed face making the hitchhiker’s teeth hurt, the hitchhiker absently carrying the baby from the scene, viewing and pitying the mortally wounded in the car his car struck.   The truck driver’s nonchalance adds an eerie feel.  Pouring himself coffee, not calling on his radio for help.  The trucker tells the hitcher “You’d better hang on to him,” when the hitcher tries to hand over the baby so that he can talk to those arriving in other cars. 

 

     The first person narration from the viewpoint of the hitchhiker gives the reader both insight in to what happened and also leaves much untold, to be assumed by the reader.  The last paragraph of the story indicates that the hitcher’s drug problems continued and perhaps became worse after the accident.  We leave him drugged, hallucinating in a hospital’s detox unit, flashing back perhaps to the accident scene, and expressing the helplessness he feels – helplessness to stop the accident he felt he knew was going to happen, helplessness to do anything for anyone when the accident did happen, and helplessness now, in his addiction, to even respond honestly to the questions he is asked by doctors.  He finds the concept that he could act, be proactive, help or even respond honestly ridiculous.  He feels he has lost all control.

 

On Tuesday, November 6, 2012 6:57:38 PM UTC-8, Shane Nelson wrote:

[sarahryanrobinson]

Sarah Robinson

English 151

November 8, 2012

Car Crash

 

            To be honest, I don’t really know what to say about Car Crash. It is readable and interesting in its own way, but somehow it doesn’t compel me to read more. There are part of this story that stood out to me, parts like his description of the lining of his veins being scraped raw by the drugs he had ingested, but others failed to do so. These parts just hit the ear wrong or not at all. Parts like his depiction of the drifting sensation of leaving the highway contrasted with the sensation of running aground at rush hour. The use of the word “sensation” is overbearing and distracts the reader from the analogy he is trying to make.

            The entire piece seems to me to be a grey-tinged reflection of humanity’s nature. Like seeing the world through a smokey and distorted lens. Maybe this is intentional. Maybe the author wants us to see and to feel what it is like to be drifting alone and without purpose. To be bereft of any care as to what happens to us. If this is the case then there are indeed part of the story that are quite effective, but I can’t help but feel as though there is something lacking in order to really pull me into the story entirely.

            Then there is the ending to this very short story. The entire piece up until this point has been told from a particular perspective and even though the timeline skip about a bit the narrative isn’t lost is this chaos. However at the end the time period jumps dramatically and shifts to a (possibly future) state wherein the narrator seems to be in the process of being committed to a psychiatric institution. While this may be moving it doesn’t seem to connect in any real way with the previous parts of the story and is a jarring way in which to end a story.

[Zhizhen Zhou]

Zhizhen Zhou
Car Crash While Hitch-hiking Responses
    I still do think the man has the ability to predict the future, does not matter if it is related with his drug problem. But still, it does not matter if he can or cannot.
   
    What interested me is the symbolic meanings of the cars and the stories of the people in the car. I have been thinking, those run-into's in our lives, the classmates in the community colleges, pass-by's down the street, even the managers of the bank you go, the utility guy you see in your apartment's lift, they have various lives. And everyone is a little short legend.
   
    But we do not pay attention to those things, as our own lives have already brought enough headaches for us to bear. It reminds me of one episode in my favourite show, the X Files, when a man who can see the death itself but he himself never dies, his life, which is more than one and a half century, weakened his sense of death and the tragedy of others.
   
    When I was little, my parents always told me to be obedient as they were already stressed by their jobs. It is not that they do not care but they cannot care more. Like the man in the story, taking drugs, knowing what was going to take place and even gave up thinking about himself. Life for everyone is a journey as his, one can never take the total control of the direction of everything.
   
    He got into the car, like what we do. We step into the society and start to live like a normal man, but the innocence vanishes as time goes by. We know we have to strive for the whole life but there is no such thing as a alternative choice for us. We are forced to obey the morality, obey the regulation and what we suffer from forms our life and make us vivid in this world.