The thought of ‘going nowhere’ is daunting. Being stuck in the same place, psychologically or physically, is an unsettling concept, that both protagonists in “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” and “Drown” are facing. The unnamed protagonists also act as the first-person narrators in their respective stories and are both struggling with the long-term impact of a traumatic life event, which holds them back mentally and physically. Denis Johnson and Junot Díaz both use a non-linear timeline in their stories to highlight this issue of trauma. However, they use this crafting tool to different effects. Whilst Díaz uses a circular timeline with smooth transitions in “Drown” to emphasis the effect that trauma from sexual harassment has and how he cannot escape this — psychologically and physically —, Johnson highlights the deteriorated mental state of his protagonist in “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” through abrupt time jumps.

Both short stories play with time in the syuzhet differently. Notably, Johnson’s story includes only one major flashback and one flash forward and remains fairly linear, especially towards the climax of the story, whereas in “Drown” there are about eighteen time jumps, between flashbacks and the present, creating a circular timeline.
            Nonetheless, “Drown” makes it relatively easy for the reader to follow those time jumps, by creating smooth transitions that logically follow the narrators’ thoughts. For instance, when the narrator walks through a mall he remembers his days of stealing with his former best friend and smoothly guides the reader into that memory: “The circuit I make has not changed since my looting days” (Díaz 76). Most of the places he visits in the present are closely connected to his past with his former best friend, Beto, whom he is actively trying to avoid. The memories almost force themselves upon the narrator.
            In “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” the narrator is also struggling with his past, yet this is shown through a different approach with time as a structuring device. The flashback and flashforward come without any connection to the previous train of thought and are only announced by temporal phrases: “… But before any of this, that afternoon, (…)” (Johnson 101) and “Some years later, (…)” (Johnson 106). The story is told in a distorted manner as if small pieces of the narrator’s memory are joined together in a sudden and unpredictable way.

Why the narration in Johnson’s story reads so unpredictable and abrupt can be explained by the content. The entire short story, even the flash forward, is told from the perspective of the narrator looking back, as it is written in the past tense. At the point of time in which he is telling this story, he has been through a car crash and a phase of drug abuse, both of which potentially have left some long-term damage on his brain. In every car, he hitchhikes in, he consumes drugs (Johnson 100) and he goes on to mention amphetamines, alcohol, hashish and speed (Johnson 101-102). This explains the distorted timeline, as the narrator himself has distorted memories of the events, because of the drugs he consumed.
            There is a stark contrast between the fuzzy memories in Johnson’s story and the vivid flashbacks in “Drown”. In “Drown” form and content are related through the sense of feeling stuck. The narrator is not only stuck psychologically in his past, which catches up with him in the circular timeline, but also physically through his poverty and other socio-economic reasons. He cannot leave his hometown and is therefore constantly confronted with memories tied to certain places. His teacher literally tells him: “(…) the majority of you are just going to burn out. Going nowhere” (Díaz 84) and his mother also does not strive for change: “I’ve tried to explain (…) that everything changes, but she thinks that sort of saying is only around so you can prove it wrong” (Díaz 74). The narrator has no hope for any positive change in his socio-economic state.

In addition to this sense of ‘going nowhere’, the narrator in “Drown” has trauma from his former best friend sexually abusing him. The circular syuzhet reveals small hints leading up to this traumatic event and keeps a very close and controlled horizon of expectation. The first clue is in the third sentence of the story when he calls Beto a “pato” (Díaz 71), which is a Spanish slur for homosexuals and is hidden by the language barrier for some readers. There are multiple small pockets of tension throughout the story that suggest that something traumatic has happened to the narrator. For instance, when the narrator comes home and is “terrified” that Beto could be inside with his mother (Díaz 79).  The resolution is in a flashback towards the end, which reads like a confession: “Twice. That’s it.” (Díaz 82). The circular timeline and the memories in connection to Beto show how much this event has impacted him. There is no escape as his traumatic memories haunt him.
            In “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”, just like so many other aspects, the trauma manifests itself in a more distorted way. The traumatic event, the car crash, seems to have developed into a mental illness: “’Are you hearing unusual sounds or voices?’ the doctor asked. ‘Help us, oh God, it hurts,” the boxes of cotton screamed” (Johnson 106).The flashforward leaves the reader questioning the reliability of the narrator. There is a significant shift between how the narrator experiences reality throughout the story and the long time jump highlights this sudden change.

Even though “Drown” and “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” differ in many aspects, for example, the transitions in the timeline and the way in which the flashbacks are told, they have one main characteristic in common: Time is used as a structuring device in both to highlight the effect of trauma on the mental health and the perception of both narrators. The structure of the story reflects the content and how the protagonists feel, which gives the reader a close and intimate insight into their minds.

© Anna Diedrichsen 2023

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Díaz, Junot. “Drown.” Drown. Riverhead Books, 2006, pp. 71-85.

Johnson, Denis. “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” The Paris Review NO. 110 (Spring), edited by George Plimpton, 1989, pp. 100–106. 

Secondary Sources

Liveley, Genevieve, 'Russian formalism', Narratology, Classics in Theory Series

(Oxford, 2019; online edn, Oxford Academic, 17 Apr.

2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199687701.003.0006, accessed 10 Jan. 2023.