ABSTRACT
A man makes his way northward on the New Jersey turnpike in his car; it is late at night and the lights of passing traffic blur into a tapestry of hypnotic motion: “Up ahead of me on the turnpike, blue lights flash far and near as I clear the toll plaza and start toward Cataret and the flaming refinery fields and cooling vats of Elizabeth” (Ford, Independence Day 175); the man contemplates relationships, complicated and unfulfilled. Later, on slightly less crowded roads, he finds himself checking into a hotel where a murder has just occurred. Another man, driving a stolen car, makes his way with his daughter and his girlfriend from Montana to Florida. Still another man, out of work, the day before the Fourth of July, contemplates why his wife, a waitress at a bar, has chosen to share his dead-end life; later, the couple wave sparklers in the backyard and dance in the rain. A boy, sixteen, discovers that a gulf between his own life and that of his parents has grown irreparably large—the boy learning that he can no longer count on or define himself according to his own father’s pain. It is the end of childhood, time to think about leaving home, to cast the past aside, though the storyteller is clearly marked by the memory of that moment when independence came not as choice but as a literal and a psychological necessity.
