The Wayward Bus

Alice Chicoy is Juan’s wife and the manager of the restaurant and store at Rebel Corners. Alice is desperately in love with Juan, who is a representation of Alice’s belief in a “scarcity” of men, especially in the isolated valley. Her desperation is expressed through her misogyny toward other women, her hatred of flies, and her alcohol misuse. Alice hates other women and iconizes Juan because she sees men like Juan as inherently strong and important, while she views women as inferior and a threat to her marriage. Alice also internalizes her hatred for other women into herself. She believes she is unworthy of Juan’s love and deserving of his physical abuse.

Alice is frequently on edge, which is manifested in her battle with the flies that are a constant pest in her house and restaurant. Alice sees the flies as evidence that the world is dirty and disorderly, which she cannot accept: “In a world that was not easy for Alice to bear or to understand, flies were the final and malicious burden laid upon her” (9). Alice self-medicates with alcohol misuse to the point of hurting herself. Alice’s character highlights the perils of isolation and stasis and the problem with putting all of one’s faith and love in one person.

Pimples, whose real name is Ed Carson (though he wants to be called Kit), is a lonely young man who works as a mechanic for Juan. Juan assumes that Pimples, like most of the young men who have worked for Juan, will eventually leave for bigger cities and more opportunities. Pimples is a good employee and forms a partnership with Juan. Pimples respects Juan because Juan respects Pimples’s autonomy and calls him Kit. Pimples’s nickname stems from his acne, which symbolizes his internal conflicts: “His whole system and his soul were a particularly violent battleground of adolescence […] His mind and his emotions were like his face, constantly erupting, constantly raw and irritated” (16). Pimples is self-conscious and wants to develop an identity that is based instead on his manhood and not his acne. However, Pimples is still learning who he is, what he wants, and how to relate to others. He decides that he can become a better man if he finds a good woman to love, so he makes a pass at both Camille and Norma on the bus journey. Pimples ruins his chances with Norma by becoming too aggressive with her and calling Camille a “tramp.” In trying to emulate the men around him and belittle women, Pimples acts against his characterization as a kind young man. By trying to be something he is not, Pimples’s development remains static.

Norma is a young woman who works as a server in Alice’s restaurant. She is lonely and projects that loneliness onto her fantasy life. She is obsessed with the Hollywood film star Clark Gable and even writes letters to him as though they truly know one another and are destined to be together. Norma is nice, and others take advantage of her. She finally stands up for herself against Alice, who is mercilessly mean to her, by quitting her job and joining the bus ride to San Juan so that she can make her way to Hollywood, meet Clark Gable, and start a new life. On the journey, she grows attached to Camille, whose beauty and confidence she admires. Norma convinces herself that she and Camille can stay friends and find an apartment together. Norma has a moment with Pimples in which she recognizes his loneliness and vulnerability, but she quickly shuns him when he insults her and Camille. Norma may be lonely, but she is also discerning about whom she trusts.

Ernest is a traveling salesman who sells gag gifts and serves as a foil for Elliott Pritchard. Ernest is savvy and ambitious, but unlike Elliott, he is also committed to a life without commitments. Ernest tells people that he wants a wife, a home, and a more stable life, but the narrator notes that “Ernest always said this. When he was drunk he believed it. […] He would run away from a home immediately” (131). Ernest is, unlike his name suggests, not earnest. He pretends he wants something he doesn’t actually want. He once had a wife, but he left her so that he could live a life on the road, free from responsibility to others. Ernest is also a veteran of World War II and grapples with his wartime traumas. In this way, Ernest represents a new generation of post-war American men, whose experiences at war taught them to distrust the promise of prosperity and happiness in America.

Elliott Pritchard is a successful businessman with a cookie-cutter life. His family is on the bus ride to San Juan to take a vacation to Mexico. His wife Bernice is obedient to him, his colleagues respect him, he’s raised a well-educated daughter, and he is confident in himself. However, Elliott’s outward appearance of confidence and perfection masks his insecurities. He is in a loveless marriage, and although he espouses conservative values, he watches nude women dance at stag parties. Elliott keeps this secret life and self hidden from others. When he meets Camille, who recognizes him from a stag party where she danced, he is forced to confront the part of him that is sexually repressed and miserable. Like the other characters, Elliott battles an internal conflict, specifically a deep loneliness that he first felt after his younger sister was born: “suddenly there were doors closed against him […] and his mother was always busy. And then the cold loneliness had fallen on him” (238). In this sense, Elliott is driven to avoid rejection or feeling as though he isn’t important. When Camille rejects him, he takes his frustration out on his wife, whom he rapes when she is ill with a migraine. Elliott’s belief that he can possess Bernice is indicative of the false sense of control in business. Elliott represents the possession, entitlement, and fallacy Steinbeck believed was wrong with capitalistic America.

Bernice is Elliott’s wife and a fellow passenger on the bus journey. Externally, Bernice is depicted as a stereotypical 1940s American housewife with few opinions or interests of her own. Her superficiality is used against her, as both her husband and her daughter Mildred view her as kind but uncomplicated. Bernice has internalized society’s expectations of what an ideal housewife and mother acts like, and her true feelings come to light only when the narrator exposes her interiority. For instance, Bernice feels excited by Camille’s story about Loraine and the fur coat but verbally “beats herself” for feeling that way. To combat these real—but uncomfortable—feelings, Bernice composes imaginary letters to her friend Ellen that uphold the identity she wants to project. Steinbeck also characterizes her as having “a kind of indestructibility” (54), which speaks to Bernice’s hidden layers. Her internal conflict is symbolized through her chronic and painful migraines, which are her only way of acting out and asking for help. Bernice is unempowered, which is evidenced when her husband rapes her and she decides to forgive him for the physical and emotional pain he causes her.

Mildred is Elliott and Bernice’s daughter. She is a 21-year-old woman in university who is impassioned by social and political causes and inspired by the idea that her boring life can be transformed by adventure and life experience: “[She] wanted to meet new and strange people and through such contacts to become new and strange herself. Mildred felt that she had great covered wells of emotion in her, and she probably had. Nearly everyone has” (57). Mildred is therefore average even in her desire to be extraordinary.

Mildred is self-conscious about her ordinariness, which she projects through her sexual desire for Juan, whom she objectifies due to his Mexican heritage. Mildred believes that being with Juan would mean that something about her stands out compared to her cookie-cutter parents and her typical life, though her parents’ internal thoughts and motivations suggest that she—in some ways—is more like her parents than she believes but has yet to develop the masks they use to navigate social norms and expectations.

Van Brunt is characterized as a cantankerous and unpleasant passenger on the bus ride to San Juan. He annoys Juan, whose driving and sense of direction he criticizes, which puts everyone on edge. Near the end of the novel, Steinbeck reveals that Van Brunt’s attitude stems from stress about his health and the fact that he is tired of living. Van Brunt’s past strokes are a secret he has kept even from his wife, which isolates him in his fear that the next stroke might kill him. Furthermore, the strokes changed his personality from light-hearted to impatient, and “He was too old to accommodate the personality change of his stroke and the new nature it gave him” (256).

A major plot twist occurs when Van Brunt has a stroke while the bus is in its rut. His life-threatening condition prompts the others to work harder and faster to get the bus out of the ditch and back on the road, which is ironic given how vociferous Van Brunt is about Juan’s driving. Van Brunt ends the novel with his life on the line, relying on Juan’s driving to get him to safety. Steinbeck implies that Van Brunt is dying from this stroke, and his storyline ends on an uncertain note, as it is not clear whether he survives.