Adam of the Road

The road is the most important recurring symbol in the book. It represents home and is connected to the themes of Losing Childlike Innocence and Coming of Age and Searching for a Sense of Home, Belonging, and Fulfillment. At the beginning of the book, Roger speaks the book’s most frequently quoted lines:

“A road’s a kind of holy thing,” Roger went on. “That’s why it’s a good work to keep a road in repair, like giving alms to the poor or tending the sick. It’s open to the sun and wind and rain. It brings all kinds of people and all parts of England together. And it’s home to a minstrel, even though he may happen to be sleeping in a castle” (52).

Roger, a well-traveled minstrel, has a deep understanding of a minstrel’s place of belonging on the road. At the beginning of the book, Adam doesn’t understand this and is daunted by the length and breadth of the road ahead of him (52). When he is separated from his father, Adam remembers that his father said the road is home to a minstrel, but he asks himself, “Which road?” (164). This demonstrates that he doesn’t understand Roger’s definition of home. However, as the story progresses, Adam begins to establish his own definition of home and creates his own relationship with the road.

Adam spends most of the book on the road, and though he is often discontented and frustrated with his situation, he is even less happy when he has to stay in one place for a long period. This is true at the beginning of the novel when he is a student at St. Alban’s and later when he spends the winter in the de Lisle house: “Idling about the great, empty house when the de Lisles were away was no life for a minstrel. His place was on the road” (280). Without his father and Nick, Adam is forced to find his own sense of home and belonging, and he finds them out on the road, like a true minstrel.

When Adam returns to the road after the long winter months in the empty de Lisle house, he sings:

The highway is the minstrel’s home,

He’s working when he’s playing;

He’s never lost if far he roam –

He wanders when he’s staying (279).

Adam is given multiple opportunities to make his home elsewhere—in the de Lisle house; with Perkin’s family; at Oxford—but each time, he chooses to return to the road. This demonstrates that Adam has come of age and can make his own decisions, and he knows that his true place of belonging and fulfillment is the road: “His heart was filled with a deep content to be out on the road once more. He sang over the song that he had made about it. A road – how clearly he remembered Roger’s saying it – was a kind of sacred place” (282). Each time Adam begins to feel restless, the road returns as a symbol of home and belonging. The road becomes a part of Adam, prompting the title Adam of the Road.