Compare and Contrast Essay: Car Crash While Hiking by Denis Johnson and The 400-Pound CEO by George Saunders

On the surface, Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hiking” and George Saunders’ “The 400-Pound CEO” are very similarly plotted short stories. They each center around a primary narrator clearly broken in spirit and energy, the first person point-of-view muddled by disturbed minds. Both stories climax with specific character development, namely the protagonist witnessing a key death, shirking responsibility and their involvement, and later experiencing comeuppance and institutionalization. However, there is a clear difference between how each author chooses to set up and contextualize resolution, or lack thereof. Johnson and Saunders both portray similar follies of differing mental illnesses.

The greatest contrast between the two short stories is choice in narrative structure. Johnson used past tense to introduce a mysterious, unnamed protagonist, with little elaboration towards the one main scene, that being the impending car crash. The focus stays on the unfolding events, bringing a reader into the action. Conversely, Saunders uses present tense to characterize main character Jeffrey, and the specific shenanigans and abuse he faces from his coworkers, slowly building over time and multiple scenes to the impending murder of his boss Tim. With greater understanding of his motivations, there is a focus on the purpose and gravity of Jeffrey’s decisions. Even besides these apparent differences in contextualization, the specific mental illnesses depicted and how they are represented vary greatly.

Throughout the text, both authors take care to provide ample evidence of the narrator’s flaws and disturbances. For starters, Johnson uses wacky hyperbole to express the trait of delusion. Observations like “I knew every raindrop by its name” (Johnson, 4) start subtle, but become much more overtly nonsensical to the point of hearing voices, such as a box of cotton exclaiming ”Help us, oh God, it hurts,” (Johnson, 12). Other sentences build a sense of detachment from reality. The unknown protagonist's thoughts stray from “Not caring whether I lived or died.” (Johnson, 4) to “I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.” (Johnson, 11), the latter of which is inappropriately associated with the emotion of hearing a grieving woman’s screams. Perhaps contributing is the consistent intake of drugs, such as “pills that made the linings of my veins scraped out.” (Johnson, 4). These distinctions of poor mental health are important to consider, given they embody our gateway perspective of the events taking place on each page.

Meanwhile, Saunders has protagonist Jeffrey exude completely different yet still troubled characteristics. His self-loathing due to a large body is evident in lines like “Clearly I repulse her.” (Saunders, 2) and later overtly with “Give up. Be alone forever.” (Saunders, 3) and “I hate myself.” (Saunders, 4). There’s also a graphic level of detail to the barbs he tolerates from others, from colleagues who “leave hippo refrigerator magnets on my seat” (Saunders, 1) to his boss Tim paying coworker Freida fifty dollars to be seen in public with Jeffrey, just to mock the “visual incongruity” (Saunders, 3). As a result, Jeffrey remarks that “So much sick rage is stored up in me” (Saunders, 5), having internalized his anger and desire for revenge and justice. These repeated occurrences provide a reader with perspective on issues each main character faces and imputes, which eventually guide and explain a critical decision under trauma. 

Different paths lead both narrators to the same dilemma: how to deal with the immediate aftermath of a gruesome death, which in turn is where themes converge. In parallel, Jeffrey kills his boss, Tim, while Johnson’s narrator experiences a car crash where the driver is bleeding out. Besides the symmetry of a death itself, both narrators also take actions under the guise of moral goodness, specifically helping save a life. Jeffrey’s initial motivation in attacking Tim was to prevent his boss from using a blackjack to kill an “animal rights girl” (Saunders, 5). The unnamed narrator carries a baby out of the wreckage to presumed safety. Yet both authors make it clear that these are not the primary motivating factors behind their actions. 

In fact, the previously discussed negative traits are the culprit for these key decisions regarding the death of another character. Even after the animal rights girl escapes, Jeffrey cannot let go of his anger nor Tim himself. Incapacitation turns lethal as dissatisfaction for the way others treated him fuels Jeffrey’s desire for revenge, the true cause of his boss’ demise. On the other hand, the real motivation for the unknown protagonist leaving the scene of the car accident with the baby was one of detachment, wanting to avoid responsibility for the dying man. The baby’s safety is merely an afterthought, offered to a random truck driver and later dropped as a plot point altogether, never to be resolved. At this point the words blend together, as illustrated by the quotes “My secret was that in this short while I had gone from being the president of this tragedy to being a faceless onlooker at a gory wreck.” (Johnson, 10) and “It’s me I love. It’s me I want to protect. Me.” (Saunders, 5).  Jeffrey and the unknown narrator both go on to deny their involvement in the deaths, favoring self-preservation through a lack of attention. The poisoning of the mind becomes prominent in both cases as the main characters’ facades concurrently shatter.

For both short stories, the authors employ a technique of repetition, contrasting the use of a common mantra with the truth of the narrator’s situation. Johnson specifically references multiple variations of the quote “There’s nothing wrong with me” (Johnson, 11). Yet this is a self-admitted lie that the narrator avoids acknowledging until the bitter end, a failed attempt at deluding oneself and avoiding the attention of doctors and authorities. For Saunders, it’s Jeffrey’s belief in his own goodness, constantly affirming “I’m not a bad guy.” (Saunders, 3). This self-fulfilling prophecy falls apart with spiteful revenge tactics such as when Jeffrey would “drop a few snots in his coffee cup and use my network access privileges to cancel his print jobs.” (Saunders, 4), or the ultimate sin of trying to use murder for his own political gain in crafting a fake letter of promotion from the recently deceased. Perhaps ironically, neither narrator can hide their truth, with doctors discovering there is something wrong with the unnamed narrator, and a court condemning Jeffrey to fifty years in prison for the immorality of his crime. 

Ultimately, there are no happy endings, even with societal establishments for rehabilitation. The unknown narrator spends years in and out of “Detox at Seattle General Hospital” (Johnson, 12), implying they never recover long enough to avoid going back. Jeffrey spends his time in prison lamenting the isolation and suffering caused by fatness, wishing to be reborn into a better, skinnier body for a better life. Neither can rise above mental illness to solve their predicaments, without happiness nor peace of mind. “Car Crash While Hiking” and “The 400-Pound CEO” may seem disparate, but converge on a thematic level with how the character development tragically concludes.