The Night Driver Short Story Analysis

"The Night Driver" is a short story by Italo Calvino (1967) that emphasize the struggles of human relations and technology in a postmodern era. The narrator, which I 've concluded is X, gets into an agreement with his girlfriend, and she tells him that she 'll go after Z, his rival. To save their relationship, X, drives through the rain at night to see her. As he is driving on the superhighway, he fancies the thought of her driving towards him in the other direction, along with other cars and even X on the superhighway. A character 's inner journey shows how much a character goes through changes –whether good or bad- in the story. In the short story "The Night Driver" the protagonist or any of the characters do not go through any transformations or events which might change them in a way. Therefore, the story is not like an inner journey. The story demonstrates a lonely man who has intentions to reconcile with his girlfriend, but he is lost in his thoughts and is not willing to get out of it or even get to his destination.

In the beginning, X is a normal man going through

In this story, the narrative mode is reduced to this single event: one, two, or three cars are racing along a superhighway. To complicate matters, X stops at the highway point to call Y but finds no answer. He interprets this to mean that she is on her way to his place, and so he turns around and races home again. But he also assumes that she stops halfway and calls him, finds no answer, and so rushes back to her home in B. The situation remains unresolvable as the cars pass each other back and forth along the superhighway. This is perfectly acceptable to X. In this way, he and Y have turned themselves into messages. (Alder).

In conclusion, "The Night Driver" may not be an inner journey because characters do not go through an event(s) to create character development. It 's more like an imaginative journey. For example, when X creates so many scenarios to see his