Huver Joshua 2 May, 2008 W. Johns ENG 1120 ENG 1120 FINAL EXAM In Denis Johnson's 1992 short story "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," Johnson tells the story of a drugged up man and his encounter with numerous people. People who get him high and people who merely offer him a ride and shelter from the pouring nighttime rain. The reader is forced to rely upon this man intoxicated beyond belief when in reality his reality is not real and therefore make him an unreliable narrator. For instance, the drugs from the salesman make the narrator sense things before they happen; he knows he is going to die but he does not mind getting into an accident and therefore sleeps along the ride. "Under Midwestern clouds like great grey brains we left ... with a sensation of running around. As soon as we slowed down, all the magic of traveling together burned away." Literally? The narrator loses interest in the salesman because the thrill and excitement of speeding down a high way has been compromised so the salesman can visit his girlfriend on the side. So because of this loss of interest, when they pull into the parking lot and come to a complete stop (long before the narrator is ready to stop) and so the narrator literally loses the salesman and finds a college student ready to share his hashish. So high and caught in the rain, the narrator is picked up by a family traveling west. After the Midwestern family who picked him up crashes head on with another vehicle on a bridge, the narrator begins to freak out and second guess himself. Trying to stay calm he assures the husband of the family that his wife is not dead, yet when the narrator pulls over a truck driver to get help, "he that admits" he "can't tell who is and who isn't" dead (Johnson 643). When the truck driver sits back and relaxes, the narrator is confused. "Relieved and tearful" he "[had] thought something was required of [him] but didn't want to find out" (Johnson 643). The first time the narrator passes the wrecked car, he ignores it. Yet the second time he passes he stops in amazement and made sure there was nothing for him to do. In his fragile state of mind, the slightest change in environment can drastically alter the way the narrator perceives any given situation. The crash itself did nothing, because he knew it was going to happen all along. But seeing the blood and seeing the pain and being uninjured himself the narrator expected of himself that there was something expected of him. So when nothing was, he became lost in the scene, transforming "in this short while [from] president of this tragedy to being a faceless onlooker at a gory wreck" (Johnson 643). Particular images and scenes stuck out in my head more than others the first time I read through "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" but none so much as the final scenes. In the narrator's unstable frame of mind, whose wife is it that comes through the corridor ignorant to the fact her husband is no more? Is it the wife of the man from Bethany, MO, or was it the wife of the family who he was traveling with, and he was just so messed up he thought it was the wife that had been injured? He regrets telling the officers and paramedics that he is fine and unharmed, yet keeps making the same decisions, "as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them" (Johnson 644).