If Something Happens to Me

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to suicide, physical abuse, the loss of a child, torture, and murder.

Cars and other motor vehicles help express the identities of the characters. This motif aids the book’s thematic dissection of The Illusory Nature of Personal Identities. Dash, for example, drives a flashy old motorcycle with a sidecar. His vehicle choice speaks to his public persona as a happy-go-lucky, fun person. Indirectly, however, it hints at the way he is mired in the past. The nostalgia for an vintage bike ties into his sensitive feelings about his past with Alison and what he knows of her secrets.

Additionally, a shift in cars represents a change in perspective or circumstance. Ryan begins the narrative driving all his classmates around in a large van. He’s a helpful person who is nervous about sticking out from the group. In England and France, he rents a Mini Cooper. He has to squeeze his 6’4” frame into it. His motivation for renting it is still to help others, but he now leaves the anonymity of being just another law student. He has to strike out on his own and undergo uncomfortable changes, which is represented by his struggles to fit inside the small car.

When Alison is taken at the beginning of the book, she and Ryan are in her father’s expensive BMW. The car highlights her father’s mysterious wealth. In their former identities, however, Michael drove an ordinary sedan. Later, in France, Sophia rides a bicycle to work. Each vehicle represents a shift in her and Michael’s identities. To escape the O’Learys’ vengeance, Michael first blows up his French car with Brian O’Leary in it, symbolically blowing up his new French identity. Then, he drives the O’Leary car in Kansas off the bridge. He has accepted that he is inextricably caught up in the O’Learys’ world of violence, and he, along with Shane and Gina O’Leary, fittingly dies in the mobster’s vehicle. This shows how they are all trapped by violence.