The Hitchhiker Analysis

Unforeseen Conclusions in “The Hitchhiker” Are hitchhikers always out to hurt you? In the story “The Hitchhiker” by Lucille Fletcher, Ronald Adams goes on a road trip to Hollywood. Along the way, he passes the same person waiting beside the road. Adams comes to a conclusion that this man is hitchhiking in peoples’ cars to beat him to different locations. After a few weird incidents, Adams assumes the hiker is out to hurt him. Would he ever believe that this hiker is out to save him? By the end of the story, readers have many clues to tell them the hiker is the opposite of something demonic. An important message readers can learn from this short story is that some things aren’t always as they seem. In the beginning of the story, Ronald

Fletcher demonstrates Adams’ urge to get rid of the hiker with another thoughtshot and then sensory details to back it up. Adams is on the phone waiting to speak to his mother when he remembers something he read. It was that “...love could banish demons” (Fletcher 19). The author then uses sensory details to show readers how kind and loving Mrs. Adams really was to support the idea that she was the “love” and the hiker was the demon. So Adams is calling his mother to make the hiker, or in this situation, the demon, banish. “I knew mother’d be home. I pictured her tall and white-haired, in her crisp house dress, going about her tasks. It’d be enough, I thought, just to hear the calmness of her voice” (Fletcher 19). All the ways that Adams tries to avoid the hiker and run over him support how he’s the demonic one. Once again, Adams expects the hiker to hurt him if they ever got in a car together. That’s why he wants to get rid of him. He might not be afraid of the hiker if he knew he was a good guy, even if he was not human. However, the hiker is really a good guy because Adams is dead and the hiker is an angel trying to take him to the afterlife. This is how Fletcher includes irony, because as mentioned before, the reader was made to believe the hiker was out to kill Adams. But, Adams already died from a car

However, the hiker isn’t malevolent like most people think. When Adams tries to call home, a strange woman answers the phone and informs him about his mother having a nervous breakdown caused by the death of her oldest son, Ronald Adams. This means Adams had been dead for most of his trip.This should tell others that the hiker is a grim reaper trying to take Adams to his afterlife. Even though some might think that the grim reaper is scary and evil, he is not out to kill people, he takes people who are already dead. This could be good because that means Adams would be like a ghost. To prove the hiker is the grim reaper, and not a human with bad intentions, the woman that Adams picks up doesn’t see the hiker. “WOMAN: No, I didn’t see him that time! And personally, mister, I don’t expect never to see him! All I want to do is go on living!” (Fletcher 15). This shows how only Adams can see the hiker, so he could be the grim reaper looking for Adams, since he died earlier