43 pages • 1 hour read
The Longest Ride
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Symbols & Motifs
Contrapuntal Narration
The Longest Ride is a contrapuntal narrative told in chapters that alternate between two plotlines. The effect can be jarring. For instance, the novel leaves a stranded Ira bleeding by the side of the road, turns to an off-campus mixer at Wake Forest. The stories unfold simultaneously, separated in time by four months, until the trajectory of the novel brings them together. Serendipity connects the novel’s three living people late in the novel, when Luke happens to see Ira’s truck stuck by the side of the road.
By juxtaposing the two love stories, the novel wants to build single narrative about love itself. The contrapuntal structure suggests the universality of love. The couples have many things common: Both are long-shot romances between evident opposites, both involve emotional commitments made against the reality of death, and both involve lovers defined by their families. The novel suggests such elements are not unique to these characters or their particular situations, but rather exemplify the challenges and rewards of love itself.
Shooting Star
Shooting stars have a reputation for being rare astronomical events (though in reality, they occur about one or two times an hour each night). Because of their perceived specialness, shooting stars are a traditionally romantic and hopeful sight—and this novel relies on that commonplace symbolism. They appear twice in the narrative, each time endowing the moment with magic and the promise of new beginnings and good fortune.
The first shooting star takes place when Ira returns from the war and finally shares with Ruth the reality of his medical prognosis and the impossibility of having biological children. On the beach, Ruth agrees nevertheless to marry Ira, choosing the man she loves over her own dreams, “certain we would always be happy together” (161). The shooting star marks the night the two first make love.
The second shooting star appears at the end of the novel. Luke whispers into the night that the treasure he has found is not the art that paid off the mortgage on the ranch and provided Sophia with time to find her way in the competitive world of art museum curating; rather the treasure he has found is Sophia herself. He then sees a shooting star pass overhead and has “the strange sense” (398) that the star means Ira is looking down on their love and giving them his blessing.
In both cases, the shooting stars affirm that the love Ira and Luke experience carries an aura of magic and splendor. The stars give a supernatural blessing of hope to the novel’s characters.
Letters
The narrative of Ira and Ruth’s enduring love centers on their letters. Ira writes a letter to Ruth every year on their wedding anniversary to testify to his continuing passion. Ruth writes a letter to Ira when she understands that she is dying. Sophia reads Ira’s last anniversary letter to Ruth the night he dies in the ICU.
In the novel, letters carry a gravitas that ephemeral communication like phone calls, conversations, text messages do not have. Letters, because they are a permanent expression, carry an emotional weight and significance. Letters are treasured as physical objects because they have been touched by the hands of loved ones. The decision to commit emotions to writing suggests need for a medium that conveys immortality—much as the novel suggests true love endures beyond death.
Letters also imply truthfulness. When speaking, the novel’s characters lie to each other, hide unpleasant truths, or hedge the facts. On the other hand, the letters between Ira and Ruth reveal the real love they feel for one another and act as a historical record of their lives together. The letters are not eloquent. The language is not ornamental, lyrical, or poetic. But the emotions will endure forever.
The Portrait of Ruth
Daniel McCallum’s painting of Ruth is the least expensive and most valuable painting in the Levinson Collection. Crude and amateurish, it was done as a heartfelt thank-you from Daniel, the troubled student in Ruth’s third grade class, to the only teacher who ever cared about him:
The lines weren’t exactly right, and her features were rather out of proportion, but [Daniel] had been able to capture her smile and her eyes with surprising skill. [Ira] could detect the passion and lively amusement that had always defined [Ruth] (334).
The painting means everything to Ira because it meant everything to the wife he loved.
The painting’s presence in the collection prioritizes sentimental value over cultural import. At auction, of course, the smug and elitist art world reps rightly dismiss the painting; however, when Luke buys it for Sophia, who is touched since it reminds her of the dying man with the heartbreaking love letter to his dead wife. The novel rejects the brilliant works of some of the 20th century’s most respected painters, in favor of the emotions generated by a child’s drawing.
External Dangers and Obstacles
In The Longest Ride, life is often terrifying and tragic. Ira, Ruth, Luke, Sophia, and even little Daniel McCallum, are strafed by medical crises, accidents, and bad luck. Misfortune in the competition draw twice puts Luke on the back of the wild Big Ugly Critter; in the war, Ira is wounded during a raid and then happens to be stationed at a medical ward swept by a mumps outbreak; an otherwise vigorous Ruth suddenly endures multiple strokes; Ira faces a particularly virulent lung cancer; Daniel McCallum, a healthy thirty-something, dies from an aneurysm in his early thirties; Ira skids off the road during a night drive after a snow storm.
Because the novel does not want to vilify or overly complicate the inner lives of tis characters, the conflicts they undergo to create plot must come from outside themselves. At the same time, to create poignancy, the novel relies on chance and happenstance to tear apart its protagonists’ lives—that way, readers will never feel like these people deserve what happens to them. In the face of external obstacles, the novel proposes only one solution: Love enables a person to handle a world gone wrong. Characters do not seek out help from experts, nor do they reorient their lives in the fact of insurmountable hurdles. Rather, they only rely on their partners to fulfill all of their emotional needs. The novel insists that this is the right thing to do—when Luke and Ruth want to handle their traumas alone, we are mean to condemn them for not sharing their pain or wanting to burden their partners. In the face of trauma, the novel demands its characters find someone to share life with.
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