The Lincoln Highway

“But if, on the one hand, it was an excuse, on the other, it was an exhortation—an exhortation for Emmett that he should feel no remorse, no, guilt, no hesitation in turning his back on the three hundred acres to which his father had dedicated half his life, as long as he abandoned them in order to pursue without envy of imitation his own portion, and in so doing discover what he alone was capable of.”

Emmett had decided that, following the loss of their family home to the bank, he would take his brother Billy with him, and they would start fresh, somewhere new. Through this note from his father, now deceased, Emmett receives Charlie Watson’s blessing. He relieves Emmett of any obligation or lingering guilt he might have felt for leaving his father’s failed labor of love behind, and he encourages his son to seek his own purpose and success in whatever way is right for him.

“All I’m saying, Emmett, is I’m not sure either of those approaches works that well. You can’t keep fighting the war but you can’t lay down your manhood either. Sure, you can let yourself get beat up a time or two. That’s your prerogative. But eventually you’re going to have to stand up for yourself like you used to.”

Sheriff Petersen recognizes Emmett’s inclination to reject violence and physical conflicts after the punch he threw at Jimmy Snyder resulted in the other boy’s death, but he cautions Emmett against becoming too passive and allowing him to turn his inevitable anger inward. The Sheriff’s words are a moment of foreshadowing, as Duchess’s actions are shortly to test Emmett’s patience and willingness to accept offenses without response. One of Emmett’s greatest areas of growth over the 10 days spanning the novel is his development of the ability to know when to show restraint and when to advocate for himself and on his brother’s behalf. 

“‘In the course of our lives,’ she had said, ‘we may do wrong unto others and others may do wrong unto us resulting in the aforementioned chains. But another way to express the same idea was that through our misdeeds we put ourselves in another person’s debt, just as through their misdeeds they put themselves in ours. And since it’s these debts—those we’ve incurred and those we’re owed—that keep us stirring and stewing in the early hours, the only way to get a good night’s sleep is to balance the accounts.” 

Sister Agnes’s explanation of the ways in which people harm others and suffer harm at the hands of others cemented itself in Duchess’s brain from the time he spent in St. Nicholas’s Orphanage. With a distorted sense of right and wrong stemming from his experiences with his father, Duchess has struggled to make sense of right and wrong and how people conceptualize their indebtedness to one another and society. Because morality is not inherent in Duchess, he latches onto this system of debts and accounts to manage the world as he perceives it.

“Before heading into the courthouse with his father, Emmett had taken his brother aside to explain that he had waived his right to a trial. He explained that while he had intended Jimmy no serious harm, he had let his anger get the best of him, and he was ready to accept the consequences for his actions. While Emmett was explaining this, Billy didn’t shake his head in disagreement or argue that Emmett was making a mistake. He seemed to understand that what Emmett was doing was the right thing to do. But if Emmett was going to plead guilty without a hearing, then Billy wanted him to promise one thing […] ‘promise me that whenever you feel like hitting someone in anger, first you’ll count to ten.’”

It is this promise to his younger brother that drives Emmett’s commitment to avoiding violence and situations that otherwise would cause his temper to flare. It is especially important for him to maintain control over his emotions and actions now that he is the only person left to care for his younger brother. It is this promise he struggles to integrate with the need to stand up for himself that Sheriff Petersen insists will become inevitable.

“At this juncture, Billy’s place is at your side, and he knows it. And I imagine, by now, he thinks that you should know it too.”

Though Sally loves Billy, and her life was improved by the time he lived with her after his father’s death while they waited for Emmett to finish his sentence, Sally is unwilling to watch over Billy while Emmett goes to New York to take back his stolen car. Billy has been patient and has looked forward to the promise of their reunion, and Sally feels it isn’t fair for him to depart so abruptly so soon. The brothers have been separated for too long in Sally’s eyes, and she feels the only person who needs to accept this reality is Emmett, who relents when he sees the legitimacy of her statement.

“What weighed on his father the most—what weighed on them both—was the realization that when Emmett’s mother had gripped her husband’s hand as the fireworks began, it hadn’t been in gratitude for his persistence, for his fealty and support, it had been in gratitude that by gently coaxing her from her malaise in order to witness this magical display, he had reminded her what joy could be, if only she were to leave her daily life behind.”

As a child, Emmett was not fully capable of understanding the depression his mother struggled with before she left their family. When they saw glimpses of her happiness, especially when she attended the fireworks the night before she left them behind, it pained them the most to know she had only been happy in those moments because she felt the sense of hope for a brighter future elsewhere. Emmett himself makes the choice to leave behind the same life his mother left, though for him it is propelled by necessity when there is nothing left but for him to sign the papers and relinquish their home to the bank. 

“With what but disdain can one look upon a man who in possession of this extraordinary power uses it to retrieve the remnants of a bottle of gin from across a room without having to get up from his chair?”

Emmett, who has seen his father struggle all his life to keep their farm afloat, is disgusted by laziness and pleasure seeking. Emmett cannot fathom having the amount of power, influence, and privilege that Misters Parker and Packer have and squandering it on the pursuit of idleness instead of harnessing it to achieve something greater. 

“I Have indulged you in your manner and your habits; indulged you in your temper and your tongue. But Sally, so help me God, I have come to see that I may have done you a terrible disservice. By giving you full reign, I have allowed you to become a willful young woman, one who is accustomed to nursing her furies and speaking her mind, and who is, in all likelihood, unsuited to matrimony.”

This insult to her character is Sally’s final push in her decision to renounce her lot in life as her father’s caretaker and housekeeper. While he is frustrated with her for being opinionated and outspoken, in the same breath he has doomed her to remaining at home for the rest of her life by suggesting she may never marry. Sally had prayed for him to find a woman to marry so she might be free of the burden of keeping house and cooking for him, but now, with no end to her role in sight and with his feelings about her so harshly made known, Sally begins to prepare to make a new life for herself elsewhere. 

“If I learned anything in the war, it’s that the point of utter abandonment—that moment at which you realize no one will be coming to your aid, not even your Maker—is the very moment in which you may discover the strength required to carry on. The Good Lord does not call you to your feet with hymns from the cherubim and Gabriel blowing his horn. He calls you to your feet by making you feel alone and forgotten. For only when you have seen that you are truly foreseen will you embrace the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone.”

This quotation represents Ulysses’s philosophy about God’s role in man’s life as he deduced from his time serving in Italy in WWII and affirmed in his experience of the power of the tornado he faced down. Although Billy disagrees and counters that God would never abandon Ulysses or Billy, Billy draws upon this mindset to place himself in a state of mind for action when he is grabbed by the throat by Pastor John. Billy is pleased to inform Ulysses that when he took his advice and made himself feel this sense of forsakenness, it had given him the power to defend himself. 

“In shape and principle, a Louisville Slugger couldn’t be that different from the clubs our ancestors used to subdue wildcats and wolves […] a Louisville Slugger is simultaneously a thing of beauty and a thing of purpose […] You can forget your two-by-fours, your frying pans, and your whiskey bottles. When it comes to dispensing justice, all you need is a good old American baseball bat.”

Although Duchess does not state explicitly in his own narrative chapters what his intentions for her father are exactly, his fixation on the Louisville Slugger as a dispenser of justice and the fact that he brings it along on the trip that he and Woolly make to the Adirondacks reveal that Duchess plans to kill his father, or at the very least engage in an act of severe violence. In his quote he names the weapons he has used so far against his other foes: the two-by-fours he used to hit the “cowboy” who helped Jake Snyder intimidate Emmett, the frying pan he used on Warden Ackerly, and the whiskey bottle with which he contributed to Fitzy’s intoxication and then threatened him. His embracing of the Louisville Slugger cements his intentions. 

“As the two walked from the body shop to the subway station, Townhouse went the long way around in order to point out the landmarks. Not the landmarks of Harlem, but the landmarks of their conversations. Places that had come up in the course of their time together, mentioned as they worked side by side in the fields of lay on their bunks at night. […] In leaving Nebraska. Emmett had little to regret. He didn’t regret leaving behind their home or their possessions. He didn’t regret leaving behind his father’s dreams or his father’s grave. And when he had driven those first few miles of the Lincoln Highway, he had savored the sensation of putting distance between himself and his hometown, even if he was headed in the wrong direction. But as they walked through Harlem and Townhouse pointed out the landmarks of his youth, Emmett wished that he could return to Morgen, if only for a day, in the company of his friend, so that he could point out the landmarks of his life, the landmarks of the stories he had told to pass the time.” 

Emmett is not conflicted by his decision to readily sign over their father’s farm and move many states away with Billy; his wish to return to Morgen stems instead from his desire to be able to connect with someone who is so dear a friend to him. Emmett and Townhouse developed a unique bond while they were at Salina together, and Emmett feels close to his friend in a new way when he has the chance to immerse himself in all the places he only heard about. His wish to be able to return to Morgen is a wish to be able to reciprocate, that Townhouse might experience the same happiness that Emmett feels in finally seeing his friend’s world on the outside. 

“Reality was almost certainly going to leave its mark on Billy Watson tonight. And that mark was likely to stay with him for the rest of his life as a helpful reminder that while the heroes in storybooks are usually figments of the imagination, most of them men who write about them are figments of the imagination, too.”

An example of Duchess’s mean spiritedness disguised as a gesture made for another’s own good, this quotation describes the anticipation with which Duchess waits for Billy to discover that Professor Abernathe is as fictional a character as many of the people in his Compendium. Reflecting both Duchess’s lack of belief in wholesome concepts like heroism and courage and his disillusionment with the kind of optimism conveyed in the Compendium, he expects that his pessimism is grounded in reality and resents Billy’s admiration and faith in the world and the people in it.

“‘When Billy said that as one named Ulysses, I might be destined to see my wife and child again, I felt a stirring within me. When he read to me from your book, I felt it even more strongly. So much more strongly, that I dared to wonder if, after all these years of traveling the country alone, I might have finally earned the right to hope again.’ As Ulysses said this, Woolly sat up straighter. Earlier that day, he had tried to give his sister Sarah some sense of how a statement disguised as a question could be an ugly sort of thing. But beside the campfire, when Ulysses said to Professor Abernathe, ‘I might finally have earned the right to hope again’, Woolly understood that here was a question disguised as a statement. And Woolly found it to be beautiful.” 

As he listens to Ulysses pour his emotions out before Professor Abernathe, Woolly is drawn in by the way Ulysses expresses himself. As someone who feels defeated by the pressures of the world and the expectations associated with it, to hear Ulysses speak with conviction about how his concept of his place in the world had been transformed is profoundly moving for Woolly, and his empathy for Ulysses and the way his words resonate with Woolly convey the purity of his spirit and the genuine feelings of compassion he has for others.

“‘When you put it,’ said Woolly to no one but himself, while wiping a tear from the corner of his eye, ‘when you put it all together just like that, with the beginning at the beginning, the middle at the middle, and the end at the end, there is no denying that today was a one-of-a-kind kind of day.’”

At the beginning of their saga, it occurs to Woolly how wonderful it would be to experience a day that was like no other, which was the antithesis of the structured, rudimentary days that Woolly perceives everyone else in the world to be living every day. These are Woolly’s thoughts as he slips into unconsciousness and his body begins to succumb to the effects of the overdose he took. Having lived such a day, he cannot help but want to relive it as he departs from the earth.

“The irony hidden in the old performer’s story wasn’t lost on Emmett for a second. It announced itself loud and clear—as a rebuke. For of all the boys whom Emmett had known at Salina, he would have ranked Duchess as one of the most likely to bend the rules or the truth in the service of his own convenience. But in the end, Duchess was the one who had been innocent. He was the one who had been sent to Salina having done nothing at all. And he, Emmett Watson, had ended another man’s life. What right did he have to demand of Duchess that he atone for his sins? What right did he have to demand it of anyone?”

After his conversation with Fitzy FitWilliams ended with the old man telling Emmett what happened to Duchess and the role that FitzWilliams played in ensuring Harrison’s framing of his son was successful, Emmett is humbled by the amount of empathy he feels for Duchess. Emmett realizes that, as someone who is so willing to take liberties with others’ rights and with the truth, Duchess is actually the only innocent person he had known from Salina. By comparison, Emmett has committed manslaughter, so Emmett struggles with the notion of holding Duchess accountable for how he has treated Emmett given how egregiously abused and taken advantage of Duchess has been.

“I do believe that the Good Lord has a mission for each and every one of us—a mission that is forgiving of our weaknesses, tailored to our strengths, and designed with only us in mind. But maybe He doesn’t come knocking on our door and present it to us all frosted like a cake. Maybe, just maybe what He requires of us, what He expects of us, what He hopes for us is that—like His only begotten Son—we will go out into the world and find it for ourselves.”

As she is driving her pickup truck Betty across the country, Sally has the chance to think to herself about her decision to leave home. When her father had described Emmett and his mother “goers” rather than “stayers,” he had meant it as an insult to suggest they were uncommitted and flighty. Sally, however, has come to believe it is God’s intention for his children to show the courage and initiative to go and seek their roles and opportunities in the world, and she is proud of her decision to choose action instead of complacency.

“Emmett understood that what Mrs. Whitney was sharing with him was her effort to understand, to explain, to make some sense of the undoing of her bighearted brother. At the same time, Emmett suspected that tucked in Mrs. Whitney’s list was an apology for her husband, wo was either too smart, too confident, or too hardworking for his own good. Perhaps all three. But what Emmett found himself wondering was what virtue did Mrs. Whitney have too much of? The answer, his instincts told him, though he was almost reluctant to admit it, was probably forgiveness.”

Emmett develops an admiration for Sarah in the short time he knows her. Her grace, generosity, love for her brother, and her concerted efforts to understand him are moving to Emmett, and he realizes she is in essence stuck between two men whose traits are exaggerated in overabundance. His conversation with Sarah, of which this passage is a part, factors in Emmett’s conscious decision to remove Sarah’s medicine bottle from Woolly’s nightstand at his death bed, so she might never feel the pain of guilt or complicity in her brother’s death.

“The funny thing about a picture, thought Woolly, the funny thing about a picture is that while it knows everything that’s happened up until the moment it’s been taken, it knows absotively noting about what will happen next. And yet, once the picture has been framed and hung on a wall, what you see when you look at it closely are all the things that were about to happen. All the un-things. The things that were unanticipated. And unintended. And unreversible.”

As Woolly stares at the photographs on the wall of his family’s camp, this train of thought is the means through which he processes his grief and loss. All of the photos depict the Wolcotts in happier times, when the tragedies that befell them were unknowable and before the mistakes that Woolly has inadvertently made caused such irreparable damage and fractured so many of his relationships. The frozen moments in the picture are places into which Woolly can momentarily retreat and forget all that has transpired since the happy moments depicted therein. 

“The manner in which the convergence takes you by surprised that is the cruelest part. And yet it’s almost unavoidable. For at that moment when the turning begins, the two opposing rays of your life are so far from each other you could never discern the change in their trajectory. And in those first years, as the rays begin to angle inward, the world still seems so open, you have no reason to suspect its diminishment. But one day, years after the convergence has begun, you cannot only sense the inward trajectory of the walls, you can begin to see the terminal point in the offing even as the terrain that remains before you begins to shrink at an accelerating pace.” 

In the single chapter dedicated to Professor Abernathe’s experience, this passage illustrates his perception of how one’s life begins to shift toward its inevitable outcome. Professor Abernathe has found the moment of his convergence in his fateful meeting with Ulysses, but the other characters in The Lincoln Highway, whose lives are cut short by the end of the novel, have also begun to angle inward by this point, though only one of them may yet be aware of it. It serves to foreshadow these forthcoming events and suggest that each person experiences convergences at different times, though the events of The Lincoln Highway, by exception, are illustrating a great convergence of multiple lives at once. 

“Then removing Professor Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers, he turned to chapter twenty-five and took up his pencil. If Billy were going to start at the very beginning, he would go back to the 12th of December, 1935, the day Emmett was born.”

Until Billy sits down at this moment and begins to compose his entry in the “You” chapter in Professor Abernathe’s Compendium, it might be assumed that Billy will write his own story as the hero-adventurer. Billy, however, reveals through his actions in his chapter that it has always been his intention to write the story of his brother’s life. Throughout the novel, Billy’s love and admiration for Emmett are purposefully apparent, but Billy’s decision to make Emmett the hero of the story reinforces the extent of his love and veneration for his brother, revealing the purity of his heart and the selflessness he remarkably exudes at such a young age. 

“Emmett’s father had grown up in some version of this place. As he had written in his last letter, what had been handed down in his family from generation to generation were not simply stocks and bonds, but houses and paintings, furniture, and boats. And when Emmett’s father chose to tell anecdotes of his youth, there seemed no end to the cousins, uncles, and aunts gathered around the holiday table. But for some reason, for some reason that had never been fully explained, Emmett’s father had left all of that behind without a trace. Or almost without a trace. There were the trunks in the attic with their exotic stickers from foreign hotels, and the picnic basket with its orderly arrangement utensils, and the unused china in the hutch—remnants of the life that Emmett’s father had relinquished in order to pursue his Emersonian ideal. Emmett shook his head, uncertain of whether his father’s actions should give him cause for disappointment or admiration. As usual with such puzzles of the heart, the answer was probably both.”

The novel begins with Emmett gaining insight into his father’s mind and heart when he reads the note Charlie Watson left for him. When he enters the Wolcott camp, for the first time he is able to envision from a concrete, practical standpoint the circumstances of his father’s birth and imagine what it must have been like for his father to have left it behind. While Emmett’s feelings will always be conflicted, this moment of insight allows him to see his father as a complex man with dreams and a past, to consider the person in a new way who had so long been an enigma to him. 

“As I was leaving, I turned off the radio. But then I turned it on again, thinking that in the hours ahead, Woolly would probably appreciate having the occasional commercial to keep him company.”

This quotation confirms Duchess’s decided inaction when he discovers that Woolly is still alive after taking his overdose. He knows that it will take hours for Woolly to die, during which he could summon help in order to try to resuscitate his friend. Instead, Duchess goes back to attempting to steal from Woolly’s family the approximate amount of money Duchess feels Woolly was owed, not willing to invite interference in his plan, and quite possibly tired of caring for Woolly, a role he assumed and never neglects to remind others he volunteered for.

“Billy understood that his brother had the same flaw as Achilles. Emmett was not a reckless person. He rarely raised his voice or showed impatience. But when something happened to make him angry, the force of his fury could come to such a boil that it resulted in an injurious act with irreversible consequences. According to Billy’s father, that’s what Judge Schomer had said Emmett was guilty of when he had hit Jimmy Snyder […] Through the screen door, Billy could see that Emmett was coming to a boil right now […] This must be it, thought Billy. This is the time and place t which I need to be in order to play my essential role in the course of events.” 

Billy often makes comparisons between people he encounters in his life and the characters and figures from Professor Abernathe’s Compendium, but Emmett and Ulysses are closer in Billy’s mind to heroes than anyone else. Billy recognizes that Emmett’s selflessness and willingness to bear burdens and face danger on behalf of others he cares about are marks of a hero, but Billy also recognizes that he too has a role to play in his brother’s hero story. It is with this conviction that Billy braves the uncertainty of Duchess’s unpredictability and wrath to support his brother and protect Emmett as Emmett has protected him.