In the film, One Week (2008), Michael McGowen casts his protagonist, Ben Taylor, as an everyman something that is quite unusual for a contemporary road movie. Perhaps Elspeth Cameron’s proposals in Canadian Culture: An Introduction (1997) can offer some explanation for this unusual positioning.  Cameron suggests that Canadians do not particularly like heroes, preferring the ordinary to the extraordinary; a condition she attributes to the country’s colonial past, which has given the country and its people a feeling of peripherality  because “’ Head Office’ is somewhere else” (19).

Traces of Margaret Atwood’s victims, as presented in Survival (1972), can also be seen in Ben Taylor’s progression through the movie. Developing these arguments, in this essay, I will suggest that both One Week and Ben Taylor are creations that fit in the Canadian literary tradition and can be understood more easily when examined from this perspective.