IndexIntroductionTravel Theme in LiteratureConclusionWorks CitedIntroduction"Life is a journey, not a destination." This quote from nineteenth-century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson describes how life's lessons, special moments, and hardships will help you reach your life's purpose, your final destination. This message regarding the journey of those who reach their final destination is one of the underlying themes used in literature. The travel motif is one of the most used elements in American literature. The journey is a powerful symbol often used to represent a character's adventure leading to an epiphany or some sort of self-realization. This literary device can be applied in the background, working invisibly alongside the plot, or it can encompass the entire plot itself so that all of the character's experiences are centered on the journey. There are a number of American works and writers spanning the centuries who have applied this device to their characters. Three literary works, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, use the motif of travel to illustrate the mental and physical challenges and tribulations that the characters they have to experiment. However, although all of these novels use travel, the type of travel used is extremely varied. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Journey Theme in Literature Journey is used to represent a mental or physical challenge, often daunting, that the characters in question must undertake as part of their enlightenment is integral to the development of their character. Usually, the journeys represent something missing in the lives of the protagonists, who abandon their current difficulties to find the missing piece of their character. Journeys can be literal, like those in The Road and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or introspective, like the journey in To Kill a Mockingbird. Physical journeys are those suggested by their genre: characters must literally move from one area to another, regardless of destination. However, it is not the literal act of movement through which the motif of travel exerts its symbolic meaning. Rather, the journey involves passing through unfamiliar areas, and the characters must face and resolve problems and difficulties encountered along the way. It is these attributes of a physical journey that form a dynamic character causing the characters to realise, through introspection stimulated by the difficulties encountered during the journey, a hidden or unrealized element within themselves or those around them. In The Road, as the title suggests, the protagonists, called "The Man" and "The Boy", follow a path from the United States to the ambiguous "south" (McCarthy 7) after an unspecified cataclysm devastates modern society and leaves these characters seemingly among the few survivors on the planet. However, the sudden and apocalyptic reduction in population does not protect them from the prospect of danger, as there are nomadic groups of cannibals roaming the scorched earth. The Man and the Boy must constantly work to defend themselves from these groups and at the same time search for food and resources to replenish the dwindling supplies in their shopping cart (McCarthy 3). The reason for their physical journey is obvious: they have no security in their current situation, and although their situation seems hopeless, wherever they go, they hope they can find refuge andsafety by looking for it. In this case the author does not note or mention a destination, indicating that a journey does not necessarily have a definitive end. Rather, it can be seen as a continuous process. In addition to the search for safety and the need to survive, one of the protagonists, the Boy, who appears to be no more than a pre-adolescent, is faced with the imminent death of his father, who chronically coughs up blood. Since the boy has never known independence, he essentially faces a "second" journey that adds to the metaphysical journey experienced by both characters. For The Boy, it is the journey to responsible manhood, being able to provide and survive on his own, something he didn't have to do due to his father's presence. Both must realize their true position in this reformed society (or lack thereof). The father now understands that no matter how much he wants his son to survive, his goal is to keep him alive as long as possible, with the faint hope that he will survive and, presumably, procreate. However, the son's goal is to achieve independence, and the life-and-death experiences these characters face simply serve to develop his independence. In this sense, The Road can also be seen as a quasi-Bildungsroman, a genre that involves a young protagonist who experiences psychological and moral growth over the course of the story. The Boy, initially fearful and servile, slowly begins to exercise his independence, as demonstrated by some acts of rebellion against his father. For example, when his father wishes to enter an abandoned house in search of resources, the boy refuses to enter, calling it dangerous (McCarthy 13). It is also made known that the boy is silently aware of his father's illness (McCarthy 28), meaning that he has slowly learned to accept the fact that his father will not always be there to protect and provide for him. At the end of the novel, when the boy's father dies, the boy fearlessly faces a stranger with his family and, presumably, follows them to safety. The road ideally embodies a quote from the novelist Don Williams Jr., who said: "The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination." In the characters of The Road, the lessons of survival, epiphany and growth arise exclusively from the dangers experienced along the journey, never from the destination, in fact, is not mentioned, further underlining the author's desire to continually develop personal enlightenment Huckleberry Finn is another work in which the motif of physical journey is used. However, unlike the dark and barren journey of carnal survival undertaken in The Road, Huck Finn tells the story of an escaped slave and a naive young boy. but independent on the road to freedom. This freedom is different for each character: the slave, Jim, hopes to gain freedom from his slave status by fleeing north, while the boy, Huck, hopes to gain freedom from society's decorum. civilized (Twain 32). In a way, both characters lack freedom in their positions at the beginning of the novel, and they set out to gain it despite the difficulties. However, despite the absence of cannibals as in The Road, Huck and Jim's journey brings with it a number of problems, such as being held "hostage" by two charlatans (Twain 122), having to live a double life when they come across in community (Twain 145) and escape recapture (at least for Jim) when they discover that their journey to freedom has taken a wrong turn. In this metaphorical journey, the story ofHuck embodies a bildungsroman, and he is the most dynamic character of the duo. He transforms from a naïve boy to a slightly more mature and cultured boy, having seen the true colors of discrimination and having learned about the nature of people from the various feuds and schemes that pervade the slave-holding community. For example, before embarking on this journey, Huck maintains the traditional view that blacks were to be subservient to whites and that they were nothing more than cattle in human flesh. However, halfway through their journey, Huck discovers that Jim, although a slave, is a human being like Huck himself, and even accepts the sentence to Hell for refusing to hand him over (Twain 205). This realization marks one of the novel's most profound turning points. Despite the epiphanies that Huck himself experiences, his traveling companion, Jim, remains relatively static, holding on to his beliefs from the beginning of the story and perhaps only learning that not all white people are bad thanks to Huck's kindness. A figurative journey, on the other hand. , does not require an actual movement from one area to another, although it does not necessarily exclude one. However, the characters who embark on such a journey are far from idle, as they face a fluid, active, and often powerful society that influences and attempts to shape them. It is this modeling process that constitutes the labors that are faced along a figurative path. One of the archetypal figurative journeys is used in the novel set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, To Kill a Mockingbird, in which the protagonists, Jean Louis Finch (“Scout”) and Jeremy Finch, two young children, experience the true colors of society and are forced to face the miseries of maturity beyond their years. Early in the story, readers learn that their father, Atticus, is a prominent lawyer in the city and that he has chosen to defend a black man, Jim, in their discriminatory society (Lee 18). Because of this, Jem and Scout become objects of contempt from many of the town's characters. Jem also receives a double lesson in death and courage through his forced community service to Mrs. Dubose, an irritable morphine addict (Lee 103). Of the two, Jem seems to be the one most affected by the psychological journey that the two protagonists have undertaken. embark. During the actual trial, although it is clear that Atticus has made a powerful defense and discredited Jim's accusers several times (Lee 205), Jim is still found guilty and is subsequently shot while trying to escape (Lee 212). Jem is destroyed during this ordeal, and his faith in both the utopian society he believed in during his years of naivety and the legal system is compromised. Both he and Scout discover that the world is definitely not an ideal place and that stigma can play a large role in determining factors as large as life or death. Although Jem appears to be progressing along the journey faster than Scout, by the end of the novel, Scout appears to have actually learned more than Jem. The father of the girl who accused Jim of raping her is bitter over his defeat and, towards the end of the novel, attempts to kill Scout and Jem as they are walking home. However, they are saved by the prompt appearance of Boo Radley, a hermit, about whom Jem and his friends have continually spread creepy rumors, attempting to lure him into the open. Scout, however, quickly learns that what Jem was doing was reckless and even makes an extremely astute guess about Boo's desire to remain hidden. During the harsh trials of the trial, Scout says that maybe Boo doesn't want to leave her home because of how poisonous the outside society is (Lee 231). When Boo.