The Wayward Bus Read Online Free

fantasizes about sex, as in his daydream of rescuing Camille from drowning in chapter 13. His real name is Edward, apparently a private joke at the expense of Steinbeck’s close friend and collaborator Ed Ricketts (1897-1948), and his nickname is Kit because he claims to be distantly related to the western scout Kit Carson. Juan even jokes at one point that he has “the real Kit Carson blood” in him, but he is obviously a degenerate heir of the pioneer tradition on this westward journey. His nickname emphasizes his adolescence, and his immature plan to study radar is similar to Connie Rivers’ vain ambition in The Grapes of Wrath to study radio repair by correspondence.
    The Pritchards’ daughter, Mildred or “mild red,” (“She was playing around with dangerous companions in her college, professors and certain people considered Red”) is a spoiled rich girl like Mary Dalton in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Her name may also suggest “mill dread” to indicate her resistance to her father’s corporate standards (Elliott refers to returning vets as men who have “been out of the mill”). Or it may connote “mild dread” inasmuch as she does not “want to go to Mexico” with her parents and she “dreaded” her mother’s headaches “even more than her father did.” Yet Mildred is also “a girl of strong sexual potential,” an uninhibited rebel who may break with the past and build her own life on her own terms.
    The other characters are also given emblematic names. Elliott Pritchard, whose first name hints at the origins of his character in T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, is a type of devious lecher (Pritchard = prick-hard). He lost his virginity in a brothel at the age of twenty, likes to ogle naked women at his lodge meetings, and in the course of the novel betrays “his bestiality, his lust, his lack of self-control.” After he propositions Camille and she berates him, “his mind took her clothes off.” Bernice Pritchard’s name (= burn-nice bitch-hard) suggests her repressions, of which her psychosomatic headaches are the most obvious symptom. Though “a saint” to her friends—certainly she has taken a vow of semi-celibacy—she often speaks with “delicate malice.” Juan’s wife, Alice (“a lice” or “a louse,” a small parasitic insect that sucks the blood of mammals), is a slovenly masochist. Little wonder she hates houseflies. She must compete with them for her livelihood. She closely resembles the bus driver Louie (= Louis or “louse”), a sexual predator. Both Alice and Louie are racists, for example. The cynical misanthrope Van Brunt, whose first spoken words in the novel are “I don’t like it,” is literally named leader (van or vanguard) of the point of greatest stress. In Old English, his name is associated with fire, and indeed he is on the brink of death. In Middle English, his name is associated with sexual assault, and in the final days of his life he has lost control over his sexual impulses. An unredeemable “crabby old guy,” he wants neither to advance across the bridge, bypass it, nor return to Rebel Corners. According to the store-keeper Breed, Van Brunt “wouldn’t vote for the second coming of Christ if it was a popular measure.” Yet in chapter 19, narrated from his point of view, he becomes a sympathetic figure if only because he understands that he is dying.
    Most of these characters embark on the bus trip of forty-nine miles (they are ironic forty-niners) across the Coastal Range to San Juan de la Cruz, named for the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and author of “Dark Night of the Soul.” Forced by flooding to detour along an abandoned stagecoach trail, Juan and his passengers leave the “high way” for an unfamiliar road. Juan ditches the bus in mud a few miles