Essay Questions

Bryson writes much of the book as if he is an outsider - a stranger in a strange land despite being an American. What might be the reason for this?

Before setting out on this cross-country odyssey, Bryson actually spent much of his life out of the country - in Britain, to be precise, where he travelled the length and breadth of the nation writing a similar observational travelogue. Therefore, when he came home to the United States, he did feel slightly disconnected to the land of his birth. He was similar to a man who has been suffering from amnesia and now, getting his memories back, is starting to connect with the places and the traditions with which he had once been so familiar.

Another reason for this outsider perspective is that he does not feel that he recognizes the land of his youth. Corner stores have been replaced by faceless shopping complexes. Independent traders delivering direct to your door have been replaced by generic delivery services that do not even know what your name is without looking down at the address on the package. He feels like a stranger in urbanized environments because they are eroding the way of life that he remembers. J.R. Hartley wrote that "the past is a different country; they do things differently there." This might be why Bryson writes as though he is a foreigner experiencing the country for the first time.

Bryson does not seem to enjoy large chunks of his trip. Why?

Bryson is a traveller who seems to feel more comfortable in areas of natural beauty. One of his most popular books was about his journey along the entire Appalachian Trail, which although he made humorous was clearly something he enjoyed far more than his road trip from one side of the country to another. One of the things in this book that seems to upset him the most is the way in which National Parks are increasingly marginalized; it used to be that the land around a park was also sprawling, well cared for and generally unspoiled. Now, he is seeing the evidence of urban life encroaching on nature, and he is highly uneasy about this.

The National Parks that Bryson sees are fenced off, so that they are more like idiosyncrasies or anachronisms within the modern landscape. His ire is not confined to the natural world; he is also angered after a visit to some Civil War sites, where he notes that although people are impressed by the way in which it is preserved and looked after, they do not feel inspired to create this kind of preservation initiative in their own town. He finds the lack of congruency in their thinking frustrating and this really prevents him from fully enjoying the trip as much as he had anticipated.