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Motif
Explanation and Analysis—Cars:
Cars act as a motif that punctuates the Walls family’s dramatic journey from one location to the next. Notably, the Walls’s various cars are where many family altercations take place.
For example, in one scene, a young Jeannette tumbles out of the so-called “Green Caboose” and worries that her parents won’t return for her, having witnessed their unattached attitude toward toys and pets; to her surprise and relief, they do turn back for her. In another scene, Mom and Dad get in a fight while driving. Mom jumps out of the car and runs off into the desert, leaving Dad to pursue her through the darkness and pull her back into the vehicle.
In this way, cars come to represent the Walls family’s unified forward momentum. They remain constantly in motion, and when one of them moves, they all do. For better or worse, their fates are bound. This is the responsibility they bear one another: the expectation of loyalty and unity even in the most difficult of living circumstances and interpersonal dynamics.
However, the family’s journey is anything but smooth, as represented by the constant breaking down and abandoning of cars. Indeed, the Walls’s nomadic tendencies and detachment from material goods lends a disjointedness to their lives. This is evident in their shifting attitude toward their cars. When Jeannette is young, her family gives fun, silly names to their vehicles, like “the Blue Goose” and “the Green Caboose.” This changes as she ages:
Back in Battle Mountain, we had stopped naming the Walls family cars, because they were all such heaps that Dad said they didn’t deserve names. Mom said that when she was growing up on the ranch, they never named the cattle, because they knew they would have to kill them. If we didn’t name the car, we didn’t feel as sad when we had to abandon it.
This shift in behavior coincides with the disillusionment of Jeannette’s coming of age. When Jeannette is a child, Mom and Dad make life feel fantastical and exciting through wild stories, make-believe games, and cars with charming names. As she gets older, Jeannette begins to recognize that much of what she thought of as adventure is actually just the result of her parents’ irresponsibility. This sobering realization takes much of the whimsy out of life, including the whimsy of naming a family car.
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