Three for the Road

The three novellas gathered together here under the title Three for the Road are all "on the road" stories, California most explicitly, though my young protagonist there is not driving but driven when he arrives in California at the beginning of the book and at the end leaves it. But Schlemm and The Marriage Ceremony are no less concerned with moving from one place to another, mentally as well as physically, and finally about disappearing, or at least disappearing from sight.

The characters in these tales are all survivors, though each in a different way, and in settings that vary from a topless dance club called The American Dream to a publishing house, from an office cubicle to a New York cab, and the question their survival asks is quite simply the value of survival. Are there things we should not do? Since all three novellas take place against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, that question becomes an existential one: Is one's own survival alone an adequate reason to take another person's life, or is not death, no matter whose, a contradiction of survival itself as a value?

The word "protest" has had something of a bad press at times, at least for some people, and not only in America: it has acquired a negative meaning, as if we were and are always protesting against something. But etymologically the word is altogether positive and as a word means to stand for (from the Latin, pro-testare); if we take the word and our own action seriously, the question becomes: What do we as human beings stand for? How far are we willing to go, to lie, for example, to kill, to compromise or not to compromise, in our search for something positive in our lives, something meaningful? Meaningful work, for example. Or a meaningful relationship. What do we refuse to do?

The road "(not) taken" in these works is already present in the promise of the title; it echoes not only Kerouac and Frost in suggesting the difficulty of the journey, but it also recalls Whitman, as all American roads do, open or closed as that road might now be. It is a road that leads us all across America, from New York to California, from East to West, and then back; it finally becomes the imaginary though real trajectory that has brought me personally to Europe, where I now live.