Volkswagen Blues

An example of hybridity, intertextuality takes place when a text refers to other texts or reproduces portions of them. In Volkswagen Blues, it is a structural motif that models the theme of reconciling or bringing together diverse cultures. The novel not only refers to numerous other texts and writers, including Saul Bellow and Jack Kerouac, but it also includes photographs of Jesse James and Chimney Rock, among others. This amalgamation of diverse texts creates “something new” in the form of the novel, and so is analogous to La Grande Sauterelle, who embodies “something new” with her mixed-race lineage. La Grande Sauterelle voices the postmodernist idea that all texts are actually intertextual (inasmuch as they share and build upon ideologies) when she says, “What we think is a book most of the time is only part of another, vaster book that a number of other authors have collaborated on without knowing it” (124-25).

Vagabonds, travelers, and explorers are everywhere in the novel. From the 17th-century French explorers, to the emigrants on the Oregon Trail, to the Ernest Hemingway-esque rambler, to Jack and the girl and even the Volkswagen itself—nearly every character is “on the road” or has been.