To know what you don’t want to be is not the same as knowing who you are. Ben is presented with so many versions of what he could be, and none of them pass the sniff test for him.
Ben and Mrs. Robinson are both using each other to feel like they aren’t living on a track. He wants to believe he can just float through without having to make real choices. She wants to feel a sense of control and desirability. It’s nothing ventured, nothing gained. So long as everything between them stays on the down low, nobody needs to give up anything, but nobody gets anything honest or solid, either.
Ben’s shift of his attention from Mrs. Robinson to her daughter signals a desire for something more solid, but without seeing Elaine as an individual. She’s a cypher to him. A socially acceptable version of her mother that he can appear in public with. He pursues the idea of her, but never the reality. It’s not a love story.
We end on this shot of two exhausted young adults realizing that actions have consequences and they don’t know what to do next. They didn’t think any further than escape. Even their means of escape, a bus, is just another example of the thing they were trying to escape: Stuck together with other people, all going the same way, following a repetitive route established by others who came before them.
This Builds Character 
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