47 pages • 1 hour read
John SteinbeckThe Wayward Bus
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
The wooden bridge that Juan must drive the bus over is one of many neglected bridges in the area. Engineers of the bridge were given a small budget for design and construction, and everybody knows that a regular storm that swells the river can take out the bridge completely. A married couple, the Breeds, manage a gas station near the bridge. They are alarmed by the flooding coming from the river.
Chapter 11 Summary
At first, Alice feels sadness and dread as Juan’s bus pulls out of Rebel Corners. However, she’s happy that she can be alone to have a drink. As she drinks, Alice pictures her mother dying and drinks away the memory. She tries to think about sex with Juan. Alice drinks and talks to herself as if in conversation with other people. Alice gets drunk and sees a fly. She tries to kill it by hitting it with a towel. Instead of killing the fly, Alice topples over glasses and food and falls to the ground.
Chapter 12 Summary
Juan stops the bus at the Breeds’ gas station. He walks over to the river to check if crossing will be safe. The river has not yet reached a flooding crest. Meanwhile, his passengers disembark to take a break. When Van Brunt notices that Mildred’s skirt is bunched up, she purposefully shocks him by telling him that she isn’t wearing underwear. Mildred goes to the bathroom to fix her slip and finds Camille giving Norma a makeover. Norma is thrilled that she and Camille are now friends. Mildred brings up her father recognizing Camille and offends Camille.
Chapter 13 Summary
Juan tells the passengers that the bridge isn’t safe, but he’s willing to try crossing if that’s what they all want to do. Van Brunt suggests that Juan use the old stagecoach road, but that road hasn’t been used in years and Juan is unfamiliar with its condition. The passengers bicker about what to do, and Juan is annoyed that the passengers blame him for the delay in their travel.
Bernice gets one of her debilitating migraines. Elliott sees his wife’s headaches and the toll they take on him as punishment for being unhappy in the marriage. Mildred sees her mother’s headaches as evidence of a psychosomatic desire for attention. Bernice’s migraines are painful for her, “but they governed and punished the family too. They brought the family to heel. Certain things her mother didn’t like were never done because they brought on a headache” (184). Mildred believes Bernice should see a psychiatrist, but Elliott claims he doesn’t believe in psychiatry, even though he does.
The passengers vote to take the old stagecoach road. Juan borrows equipment in case the bus needs to be dug out.
Chapter 14 Summary
The back road to San Ysidro was once used by stagecoaches, but now it has been mostly unused and returned to nature: “Only a few families who had farms that could not be reached in any other way ever used it any more” (189).
On the drive toward the road, Juan thinks of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Mexican title for the Virgin Mary. Juan appreciates Guadalupana as intrinsic protection specific to his culture and people. He promises the Guadalupana icon on his dashboard that he’ll take it as a sign from her that he must leave Alice if the bus gets stuck in a ditch.
Mildred notices a new look on Juan’s face and sexually desires him again. She sees him as a man who doesn’t care about women, which excites her.
Rain begins to pour on the bus and the old road. Van Brunt points out that without chains for the tires, Juan won’t make it up the hill.
Pimples is excited at the prospect of the bus breaking down so that he can save Camille. This is part of his fantasy to get Camille to fall in love with him. Pimples is embarrassed about his fantasy because he sees the other men on the bus as having more self-control. Pimples begins to see Norma in a new light and figures that she’d be easier to seduce into love and marriage. This prompts a new pimple to break out on his face.
Elliott is annoyed that Ernest refused his offer for a job or help with his patent. He knows Ernest sees him as some sort of thief looking to take advantage of him. To reconnect with Ernest, Elliott proposes that Ernest look into making cuff links for men that operate with a spring. Elliott says Ernest can have the idea without giving Elliott any credit. Ernest gives Elliott his business card to show he’s interested in working together.
Norma confesses to Camille that she fantasizes about being in a relationship with a movie star because she has no family and friends of her own. Norma hopes that her friendship with Camille will change that. Camille reminds Norma that it’s unlikely they will be able to live together, which upsets Norma.
The bus sputters along the road. Juan sees that the ditches around the road are filling with water. He pretends to get Our Lady of Guadalupe’s permission to keep going with the bus through treacherous road but fantasizes about his plan: When the bus is in a rut, he’ll walk away and hitchhike to Mexico, where he’ll eventually become a tour guide in Mexico City. Juan feels a sudden, deep homesickness for the Mexico of his childhood.
The bus gets stuck in a ditch, and Pimples notices that Juan forces the bus even deeper into the ditch. Pimples doesn’t know Juan’s plan, but he’s happy that his plan to get stuck with Camille is working out. Juan puts Pimples in charge of the bus while he ostensibly walks to find help. Juan finds an abandoned farmhouse to hide away in. At first, he doesn’t feel good about being free. He falls asleep by thinking about his happiest memories.
Chapters 10-14 Analysis
In Chapters 10 through 14, the bus ride’s difficult journey ending in a ditch brings out the characters’ introspection. Steinbeck uses the bus as a setting for which characters can expose their reliance on other people and their layered internal conflicts.
Steinbeck portrays people as simultaneously needing one another and being burdened by one another, emphasizing People’s Resentful Dependence on One Another. The irony of human existence is that people want to be wholly independent, but they can’t be. This is shown through the ways in which characters project their internal conflicts onto one another. For example, Elliott acknowledges to himself that he’s unhappy and projects his feelings onto his wife. This is symbolized through his attitude toward Bernice’s migraines: “they gave him sins to be atoned for. […] There were none in his business life, for the cruelties there were defined and pigeonholed as necessity and responsibility to the stockholders” (185). Notably, he does not characterize the “cruelties” of his job as “sinful”—only his private sexual proclivities. Bernice’s externalized pain thus allows Elliott to feel as though he is attending to her and lessening his guilt.
Other characters project their internal conflicts and desires onto one another to various degrees, highlighting their desires to escape The Stasis of Human Existence. Norma finally acknowledges that her obsession with Clark Gable is a projection of her loneliness and diverts that projection onto Camille, hoping that Camille will be a real friend. Pimples, meanwhile, wants to feel like a man, to be a hero, and to earn the love of a beautiful woman. He projects these desires onto Norma and Camille because he doesn’t have other hopes in his life. Juan does his own projecting. He wants freedom from the routine of his life. Rather than take responsibility for his happiness and desires, he pretends that Our Lady of Guadalupe will show him a sign that he can and should leave his life. Juan manipulates the bus ride to ensure that the sign he decides on will occur and uses his fantastical connection to Our Lady of Guadalupe as a way of avoiding accountability for his internal conflicts and decisions.
Throughout these chapters, Steinbeck uses physical symbols to represent internal strife and character development. Bernice’s migraines are a physical symptom that symbolizes the Pritchard family’s inability to be open and honest about what they want and how they feel the other members of the family hold them back. Pimples’s acne is his defining physical characteristic, but a new pimple arises when he concocts an unrealistic plan about making either Camille or Norma fall in love with him. Therefore, Pimples’s pimples represent his belief that he lacks self-control. Mildred’s physical manifestation of her boredom and subconscious concern that she is herself boring appears through her sexual desire for Juan, representing her belief that adventures with “exotic” people and places will make her freer and more interesting.
The physical setting of the old stagecoach road is also a symbol. Steinbeck describes the road as “simply a slice of country, uncultivated to start, marked only by wheel ruts and pounded by horses’ hoofs” (188). Relatively spared from the rapid industrialization of the rest of America, this old stagecoach road is an emblem of the past, when nature was predominant over human-constructed infrastructure. In its own wayward isolation, it is an ideal setting for the characters on the bus to confront their internal conflicts and deal with the external influences of those conflicts.
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