Comparing Driving Lessons by Neal Bowers and Fast Car a Song by Tracy Chapman

¶ … Car and "Driving Lessons"

Tracy Chapman's song "Fast Car" tells the story of lovers who desperately want to escape poverty but can't find a way out, and Neal Bower's poem "Driving Lessons" discusses a son who is in the middle of his parents' unhappy marriage. While they tell very different stories on the surface, the two are similar in theme and the type of imagery used. Both use driving as a metaphor, questioning the traditional idea of driving as freedom, instead seeing driving as a symbol of being trapped.

Both "Fast Car and "Driving Lessons" deal with the inevitability of family obligation, and loneliness is a theme throughout the song and the poem.

Unlike the traditional idea of the car as a means to freedom, both "Fast Car" and "Driving Lessons prove that one cannot drive away from problems. In "Fast Car," Chapman's protagonist initially sees the car as a means of escape from her dreary, everyday life, but she soon realizes that her problems go deeper than immediate location. At first her lover's fast car seem like the way to freedom, but she eventually realizes that this freedom is an illusion: "You got a fast car/And we go cruising to entertain ourselves/You still ain't got a job/And I work in a market as a checkout girl" (Chapman). Despite the fast car and the physical ability to escape, she and lover remain mired in their poverty and cannot escape. In the end, the song's protagonist gives up on the idea of driving to freedom: "I'd always hoped for better/Thought maybe together you and me would find it/I got no plans/I ain't going nowhere/So take your fast car and keep on driving" (Chapman).

In "Driving Lessons," Bower's protagonist wants to be free of the unhappiness wrought by his parents' bad marriage and his lonely family life, and he tries to drive away to live in a far away place. However, he cannot escape the legacy of the past: "He wants to be just like her,/far away and gone forever, wants/me to press down on the gas;/but however fast I squeal away,/the shaggy past keeps loping behind,/sniffing every turn" (Bowers). Bower's protagonist realizes that the problems he has an internal, and no matter where he drives, they remain with him. Thus, driving does not provide true freedom; it merely provides physical distance.

Both the poem and the song deal with family obligation as the main barrier to freedom. In "Fast Car," the protagonist is obligated to her father, who is an alcoholic who cannot support himself: "You see my old man's got a problem/He live with the bottle that's the way it is/He says his body's too old for working/I say his body's too young to look like his" (Chapman). She is further trapped by the fact that he has no other family; her mother has escaped while the protagonist stays and fulfills her duty to her father: "My mama went off and left him/She wanted more from life than he could give/I said somebody's got to take care of him/So I quit school and that's what I did" (Chapman). Her opportunities are limited because of her dedication to taking care of her father.

In "Driving Lessons," it is the protagonist's mother who is smothered by family obligation. She wants to leave the family and in fact attempts to, but father and son follow her in the car (again, showing the use of the car as a symbol of restriction and limitation) until she gives in and agrees to return home: "I don't know why she finally got in/and let us take her back/to whatever she had made up her mind to leave/but the old world swallowed her up/as soon as she opened that door,/and the other life she might have lived/lay down forever in its dark infancy" (Bowers). Her obligation to family led her to return to her marriage and forgo any possibility for freedom and happiness.

Although the protagonists in bother "Fast Car" and "Driving Lessons" are not necessarily always alone, they are both lonely.

In "Fast Car," the woman feels isolated in her caretaker role; whether she is caring for her father or her lover, there is no one to reciprocate and take care of her. She finds herself repeating the mistakes of her parents: "You got a fast car/And I got a job that pays all our bills/You stay out drinking late at the bar/See more of your friends than you do of your kids" (Chapman). The lyrics of the song reek of loneliness as the protagonist searches for something she knows she can never achieve, and her isolation is made worse by the fact that her loved ones don't seem to see the tragedy of their lives.