Walking to Vermont: A Mostly True Story is as derivative as a regional dialect. However, it does open up, in seemingly straightforward narrative opinion, the world of philosophical thoughts.
The cynical readers often say that no original piece of humor has been done since Robert Benchley, but that is not quite the point. To quote a quip that Joseph Campbell made "There aren't any original stories, only re-tellings with different window dressing".
The telling of the tale, genus Road Novel, has thematic derivatives that go back to before Homer. The point is the cultural window dressing and the commonality of perception that the reader feels with the narrative voice. As with all nonfiction or even fiction works, the beginning can be problematic. Just where would one start a first-person dialogic road novel?
Kerouac starts it off with Sal Paradise receiving a letter from our beloved protagonist Dean Moriarty. Thus, in true Buddhist form, removing self from center.
William Least Heat Moon (AKA Bill Trogdon) begins Blue Highways by laying in bed, contemplating natural and environmental sounds, and the fact that he feels trapped by his surroundings, possessions and recent divorce.
John Steinbeck uses external weather as a catalyst for movement in both The Grapes of Wrath, and Travels with Charley.
With Don Quixote. Cervantes believed that, to be under the rubric of Travel/Adventure, his protagonist had to be a social outcast in his town, and needing to find resolution.
For this work, the author opted for the structure of combined narratives as the general format of this work. An interspersal of "present" with "past" and imagination, as well as periodic rants, outbursts and musings works to bring out the "instant Gestalt" method of interpretation.
This is not an unusual structure. Joyce used it to convey the gestalt of an entire day, and in more non-linear recent writers it has been bend around a single focus of some sort. Amy Tan, and many of the eighties writers used it to point to an un-materialized center in their works that was usually a quest for self.
The non-linear method used here came from Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye. The author has attepted to use the same kind of structure in Walking to Vermont: A Mostly True Story.
It is a tough form to execute effectively. What the author tries to impart with this form is that there is a certain commonality of experience in human perception, a shared awareness of pain and disillusionment.
