The Rhetoric of Ghost Bikes

George Guay

Advisor: Douglas Eyman, PhD, Department of English

Committee Members: Paul Rogers, McKinley Green

Johnson Center, Meeting Room B, and https://gmu.zoom.us/j/95522511894?pwd=OhztdIR4gWffUi1jWfYnnfTaSpCaXa.1
April 15, 2025, 12:30 PM to 02:30 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation examines how visual rhetoric and material rhetoric, as constitutive rhetorics, can illuminate the rhetoric of ghost bikes, bicycles spray-painted white and situated near to where a motor vehicle operator fatally collided with a bike rider.  

Textual analysis of data, including photographs taken from 2016 to 2025 and at dedication ceremonies for situating ghost bikes, reveals how the messages in visual and material rhetorics create a context for decoding messages in the rhetoric of ghost bikes.   Sondra Foss’ evaluative schema of visual rhetoric starts with functionality; for example, how would symbolism, of an immobile, all-white bike, appeal to an audience to attend to the messages broadcast through this roadside memorial’s visual rhetoric?    How does that image shape discourse about the illusion of safety embedded in a means of transportation that most people learn as children?  Valerie Peterson would add to that schema a consideration of aesthetics.  The white of a ghost bike harkens to a Western belief that ghosts are white.  The white bike frame conjures an association with the residue of the deceased, a skeleton.  And the absence of a rider, invisible but a hole in space, reminds the audience how death can be a bike ride away.  Robert Dobler’s would examine the multiple messages contained in the visual rhetoric.  The ghost bike at least transmits the rhetor’s grief and challenges the conceit of car culture that roads exist only for motor vehicles.  How does Jack Santino’s concept of a spontaneous shrine identify the need to restore the dead bike rider to the community, so abruptly stolen from it?  Carole Blair and Neil Michel note how the visual rhetoric of the AIDS Quilt chastises the government for its silence about HIV/AIDS. In that way, the message of a ghost bike’s visual rhetoric implores the government to alter those conditions that facilitated the fatal collision, to avoid the need to erect another ghost bike.  

Blair’s evaluative schema of material rhetoric regards functionality as the prism for parsing its message.   Look at how the material rhetoric of a ghost bike announces its presence and location in space to rebut societal messages of safe transit amidst car culture, where a bike ride can so abruptly end.  The conjunction of the messages in the visual and material rhetorics of a ghost bike provisionally validates the hypothesis that the aggregation of the results of other constituent rhetorics can enhance an understanding of the rhetoric of ghost bikes.  The asymptote of the intersection of these constitutive rhetorics suggests that subsequent research could produce a near-perfect understanding of the rhetoric of ghost bikes.