Whitehead’s piece proves interesting as she plays with the identities of her characters. She begins the essay by lumping everyone together by claiming, “They’re all broken somehow…” (298). As the essay goes on she begins to give each passenger their own identity, distinguishing themselves from everyone else. Whitehead has two different techniques in her character identifying: she sometimes writes about them in ways that anyone could observe: “He is unaware that his duffel hits each person on the head as he passes” (299) versus other times when she writes from a third-person subjective point of view and is able to write about the thoughts of each passenger: “He saved his tips all summer and to see them disappear into a ticket quickened his heart” (301). The fact that no character ever receives an actual name except “bus driver” is a way to let the reader sympathize with the characters and yet still keep a fair amount of distance from them. This could be a bit in the grey area of nonfiction writing as it seems unlikely the author was able to see inside all of the characters’ heads.
Towards the end she makes a transition into second person narrative and refers to the passenger of “you” giving a character the ultimate identity of the reader himself. She then concludes the essay bringing it full circle as she lumps everyone together again extinguishing their identities, “In effect, no matter what time of day it is, everyone arrives at the same time, in the same weather, and in this way it is possible for all of them to start even” (302). Thus, the ways in which the author plays around with her characters’ identities or rather lack thereofprove to be representative of anyone’s experience with riding a bus.
Katie Cloutte
English 392 
I realize that Whitehead entitled the piece Port Authority because that is the station in NYC, but the majority of the piece takes place on the actual bus, out of Port Authority. This is an interesting technique because it parallels the actual journey of the bus and the people on it. Undoubtedly any particular bus starts out somewhere, much happens in the middle that is monotonous and uninteresting, and inevitably that bus ends up in the exact same place at the end, only to repeat it’s cycle an uncountable number of times.
The broad generalization of the characters, I agree, makes it easier to look past them, but when we get a closer look into their lives and experiences we sympathize and relate to them on a very real level. She then makes them a broad generalization again, which mirrors again the journey of the bus.
On the discussion of whether or not this is actually nonfiction, isn’t anything that happens in someone’s head, regardless of what the content, real and concrete to some extent?
I also found it interesting that Whitehead spent the entire story on the way to the Port Authority, only approaching it in the end. This makes the story about a place explain that place through the people that inhabit said place. Without ever entering the Port Authority, the reader gets the idea of what it will be like, huddled masses packed into rooms too small for all of them, hurrying to eat what they can when they can before they depart. Whitehead ties this all together in one quick sentence, “Different people but all the same.” (299) The idea is that all of these people form one giant mass of people, to be treated as one character, the people that are headed towards the Port Authority. On page 300, Whitehead notices the driver and writes, “The Name of Your Driver Is.” We don’t get the name because he is just another part of the mass of people, in his case herding them towards the Port Authority.
There is something “” about Whitehead’s piece. In saying “this time it will be different” or “if they think those two words New York will fixt them, who are we to say otherwise” makes the people she’s talking about seem delusional (301). It would be easy for the speaker to assume a somewhat condemning tone but instead it’s almost this mixture condemnation and pity that the speaker takes on when Whitehead writes things like “they have all heard the stories and they all come anyway” (299). Perhaps this is Whitehead’s attempt to echo or mimick the complex emotions those arriving at Port Authority must be feeling.