Spiritual Quest
On page 66 of Driving Visions David Laderman writes "The quest as spiritual and cultural in Easy Rider, however, appears explicitly on the surface of the film's narrative. [...] the film attempts like that novel to integrate the search for self with a rediscovery of America by traveling across (and into) it." Wyatt and Bill begin their journey with a destination in mind but this destination is less the physical place, New Orleans, than an event and date for their arrival, Mardi Gras. The fact that the journey's destination is a period of days during a festival makes the entire quest to get there less of a literal journey through America. This highlights a subtext of the movie that America is not a place but a people and a movement. While camping out one night Billy and Wyatt discuss their destination saying "It's a long way to Mardi Gras man." "It won't take a week to get there...We have a week." If the destination was the point of the journey then the sooner they arrive the better and all the stops along the way would be shorter and less meaningful. In the same way the America that Wyatt and Billy (or the "one man" as the ad cover states) is looking for is not a physical place but a period of time and a collection of people. This means that every moment of the journey is part of the discovery of America because America is a time, a setting, and a space enclosed by the beginning and ending and Billy and Wyatt's journey.