The Hitchhiker Lucille Fletcher Character Analysis

The play, “The Hitchhiker” by Lucille Fletcher, tells the story of a man’s road trip from Brooklyn to Hollywood. When thirty-six year old Ronald Adams began his drive on the Brooklyn Bridge, he spotted a hitchhiker on the side of the road. Adams saw the same man throughout the entire trip, but no one else he talked to seems to be able to see the man. In this story, Lucille Fletcher set the tone within the story to show Adams’s paranoia, panic, and dread, which is compatible with the horror in the story. Fletcher showed paranoia through Adam’s tone when he realized the hitchhiker is always the same person. When Adams saw the man for the second time, he brushes it off as a coincidence, but still seemed concerned. He thought to himself, “I couldn’t figure out how he’d got there, but I thought probably one of those fast trucks had picked him up,” (Fletcher, 336). He races to a nearby gas station after spotting the hitchhiker again. Here, he questioned the …show more content…
Here, Fletcher uses panic, paranoia, and dread to make the twist even more exciting. At the end of the story, Ronald Adams called his mother, only to find a stranger picking up the phone. The panic in his voice was obvious when he learns of his mother’s nervous breakdown and her hospital stay. When he discovered why his mother had a nervous breakdown, his voice started to become louder and higher. In Adams’s final soliloquy, his voice became deeper, and he took bigger pauses to further dramatize his realization. When he said, “Ahead of me stretch a thousand miles of empty mesa, mountains, prairies- desert. Somewhere among them, he is waiting for me. Somewhere I shall know who he is, and who… I… am… “ (Fletcher, 343). In this statement, Adams is clearly dreading his next encounter with the hitchhiker, based on both his words and how his voice deepens during this