Ashley Taylor, Consultant
Transportation scenes are my favorite in any genre or medium. Airplane, train, automobile, boat, ferry, bus, elevators, even bridges and stations. Vehicles can function as devices in liminal spaces, transporting characters and audience between places, worlds, states of being, and can even reflect on social change. They speak volumes when a character is encountering, contemplating, or considering a change on any scale. Because traveling often involves observing or interacting with strangers, using vehicles or stations are common maneuvers for reflecting on the human condition. Transportation scenes augment the symbolism of story, allowing objects and action to serve multiple functions, enhancing the power and meaning of the text.
Think about the function of the Hogwarts Express in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series or multiple plane rides in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or even falling down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland. These vehicles, stations, and modes of transportation serve as links between worlds that play to the larger themes of each work: the tension of being between those two worlds. If we narrow the scale from book series and novels to shorter works like flash fiction and poetry, transportation scenes communicate certain codes about what’s going on beneath the surface and in between the lines.
In Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants, two characters are sitting at a bar that lies between two train paths, one side of the tracks with lush and fertile land, the other side dry and barren. Hemingway doesn’t explicitly reveal the direction of either path or even the resolution for the tension. The emphasis is placed on the liminal space and pressure the characters feel while interacting between the two contrasting sides.
I encourage you to imagine or reflect on a time in transit or stuck between two places. Whether departing or arriving, explain the condition of the vehicle and/or station. Explore the sensory details, reveal the two worlds, and exploit the tension between them.
Examples:
Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway
You Tube link that examines an interpretation with visuals:
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley
Pdf: https://everydayliferhetoric.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/alice-notley-the-descent-of-alette.pdf
Review: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-14-058764-7
From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson
http://www.bartleby.com/188/138.html
Riding Backwards on a Train by James Hoch
http://anotherhand.livejournal.com/220418.html
The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/48411#poem
University of Louisville Writing Center 