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I walked along side the road, trying not to show my fear.  There were hardly no shoulders, so I kept glancing back to see if a car was coming.  There was also the issue of not being able to remember which side to walk on.  And of course, I was lost.  I was supposed to be meeting my new friends at a pub, but I was definitely getting farther from the town, not closer.

At least it wasn’t dark yet, but the sun was setting.  I stopped, rotated, took in the green.  No, I didn’t recognize anything.  My cell phone didn’t work in this country.  This was such a stupid idea, I thought.  Why did I think I would know where to go?  I sat down on the side of the road now.  No cars were coming this way.  I tried to assemble a plan of action.

I couldn’t remember a time I’d been this lost.  I don’t think it’s possible to feel that lost in America.  In America I would know how to get myself out of the situation, but here, I was just a speck of humanity in a sea of green.  No one even knew where I was going tonight.  I told my friends that I “might” come.  I was traveling alone and hadn’t talked to anyone from home in a day or so.

The sunset was beautiful, and as I watched, I stopped worrying.  I realized, this is not the end of the world.  I am so concerned about meeting my friends, and making a good impression.  Stop worrying.  I am in a beautiful part of the world, watching the sunset.  If I retrace my steps and look for civilization: a car, a house, I’ll find my way back.   But right then, I honestly didn’t want to find my way back.  This moment was perfect.  Sometimes you have to be lost to find yourself.

“She held her breath, bent over, and looked into the meaningless eyes. But already she knew, even to the convulsive lowering of her hand to the bare chest, even without the violent push she gave the inert torso immediately afterward. As her hands went to her own face, she cried, ‘No!’ once - no more. She stood perfectly still for a long, long time, her head rasied, facing the wall. Nothing moved inside of her; she was conscious of nothing outside or in.” Bowles, pg 230

“These were the first moments of a new existence, a strange one in which she already glimpsed the element of timelessness that would surround her.” Bowles, pg 231

In the Sheltering Sky, when Port dies, leaving Kit in northern Africa, Kit has an epiphany. It’s not perhaps an epiphany in the traditional sense, because how she feels is so very unclear. Kit herself would not be able to put it into words. Someone experiences an epiphany when they suddenly understand something that they didn’t before. This is what happens in the Sheltering Sky. After her realization, she drastically changes her outlook on life.

Kit’s epiphany is hard to define. It is impossible to know what she is thinking in the moment of Port’s death. The path that she takes throughout the rest of the book usually seems completely without reason. In a general way, I think Kit’s epiphany was about the way that she managed her life. Before her epiphany she was settled. Whether or not she enjoyed life, she was able to function and to live as she did, as a drifter. After her epiphany she could no longer function in that existence. Before the epiphany, she had her neurosis: she was terrified of omens and she could hardly hold a conversation with the man she loved. She was very aware of her existence and what went on around her. When this switch happens, at the moment of Port’s death, she is lost to the world. She can only follow and cannot lead.

The epiphany that Kit feels is truly something that cannot be put into words. It’s clear that the epiphany was in response to Port’s death, and that it was negative. It’s almost as if everything before the moment became irrelevant. There was only one thing she knew to do, and that was escape. She wanted to escape from her past existence completely. Why? Because Port was dead, but what else made her so vehemently opposed to her past. Perhaps she felt a lot of guilt for Port’s death. Of couse, her epiphany could have come out of pure fear. Her traveling companion had died and left her in a very foreign country. But if that was the case, she had Tunner to take her back to the US if she wanted to be there. Clearly, she wanted to completely erase her past and start over new. Although why, it’s not quite clear.

In some ways, the epiphany is spiritual. She is reborn completely. It’s as if her body is taken over, completely cleansed of her former life and reborn as something new and innocent. It’s true that she does become like a child, following strange men, looking for someone to take care of her, a father figure or a husband figure. She is always searching for men, wanting men to posess and take care of her. She enjoys being raped and wants Belqassim to be with her always. She is needy. It’s as if someone needs to be with her all the time or she will fall apart. She blindly searches for someone who can hold her together, no matter what the cost. She is uncabable of seeing the dangers that the people she is with present.

The strange thing is that she is in a foreign country, where she had previously understood the culture. After the epiphany, she has lost her understanding of the country. She immerses herself entirely into the culture, even becoming part of a harem. Its amusing because in some ways she becomes the ultimate traveler: just like Kurtz she erases her society and joins a new one. Kit’s epiphany will never be easily explained. It is a complicated emotional change that comes from Ports death. What exactly she feels after the epiphany, and what her motives are for wandering around in the desert attaching herself to strange men are not clear in the book, so we can only speculate.

“If I’m not careful, I might end up left behind… but if I lost myself, where could I go?” pg 61

At the part of Sputnik Sweetheart when Miu told K that Sumire had vanished off of a greek island, I immediately thought of the film L’avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni.  The similarities of the situation are striking.  A woman takes a boat ride with her friends off the coast of Italy.  They stop at an island, nap, and when they awake, the woman has disappeared.  Like smoke.  Her best friend and her boyfriend (similar to Miu and K, with gender reversals) set off to find her, but the island is hardly more than a large rock, and she’s clearly not there.  They head to the mainland and go through all the motions: talking to the police and filing reports.  But soon they forget about her.

The Adventure.  It’s a strange title for a story about a missing woman.  But at the same time I feel like Sputnik Sweetheart could have also been called The Adventure.  There is a lightness that the title suggests, as if the story will be simply about an adventure.  This fits though, because each story takes the fact of a missing woman rather lightly.  K and Miu are never very worried, in my opinion.  They surely don’t act the way I would in the situation, and in L’avventura, the friends seem to only pretend to worry.

I can’t begin to guess what happened to either woman, and in both L’avventura and Sputnik Sweetheart there aren’t many hints.  Where does one go when they are lost?  Speculations are commonplace, but nothing is revealed with certainty.  Sputnik Sweetheart dissolves into a mix of magic and surrealism, whereas L’avventura evolves to a realist romance as we forget about the character who was introduced to us as the lead.

I find this book to me very far away from a travel novel.  I find it to be much less about the experience of changing through travel by learning about a new culture than about traveling to a parallel universe (if only one inside your mind) and finding yourself, or perhaps losing yourself.  I think losing yourself is key.  I think that in both L’avventura and Sputnik Sweetheart there are important relationships between losing and finding, although articulating them would be difficult.

I remember at the end of L’avventura I was far more confused than at the beginning, and I feel the same way now that I’ve finished Sputnik Sweetheart.  There is no closure.

First off, I want to say how much I enjoyed reading A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.  The protagonist, although sometimes annoying, is very endearing.  The story is so accessible to me, I didn’t want to put it down when I was reading it.

I think the concept of a chinatown is a perfect metaphor for this story.  The story is about the mixing of English and Chinese cultures.  The London Chinatown is like a little snowglobe of culture in the middle of a very different world.  It’s a strange concept, an attempt to preserve a culture in a foreign land.  I believe there is often no intention by the Chinese to merge with the culture that surrounds their Chinatown but what ends up happening is that there is a merging of cultures, just as Z’s culture merges with her lover’s culture and how she merges with the foreign culture that she is placed in.

This is a perfect travel story, because it relates travel and the theme of place to the lives of the main characters in a non invasive way.  Travel plays a huge rule in the gradual maturing of the protagonist.  In the beginning she is needy, she doesn’t speak English very well and is waiting for someone to come take care of her.  She does find someone to take care of her, to give her shelter and food and love.  He shows her his London.  She is lucky that she manages to learn how to live on her own by the end of the book, because she is so dependent on her lover that she could have lost her identity completely.

The way Z matures and changes is shown through her writing: at the beginning of the book she can only speak fragmented English and throughout the book her English improves.  She also becomes more aware of herself as a human: she becomes comfortable living with herself and being on her own.  Z says at the end, England is “the country where I became an adult, where I grew into a woman.”

There is a theme of trying to find one’s home.  Both Z and her unnamed lover are searching for a place where they will ultimately feel satisfied.  Z’s lover is a self described drifter, a traveler like Port, searching for something unknown.  It appears at the end that he may have found his home in the Welsh countryside, and Z may have found hers in Beijing, but their homes are not together.

I think that the Journey of Ibn Fattuouma is the most fitting book we’ve read in class. The book is about traveling unlike any of the other books we’ve read, because whereas the other books are stories of travel, this one is travel. It shows the main character in every type of travel environment. The main theme of the book is finding oneself through travel.

The book is such a strange mix of fantasy and reality. I feel like it is a coming of age tale using travel experiences as life experiences in a fantastic atmosphere. It reminds me of The Horse and His Boy by C.S Lewis. The Horse and His Boy is a sort of fairy tale but is very similar in that it features the journey across the desert of a young boy who grows up along the way. Both books seem heavily metaphorical to me: The Horse and His Boy is loaded with religious symbolism, and in the Journey of Ibn Fattouma each place represents another way of living. I also see religious symbolism in the Journey of Ibn Fattouma. In the last chapter, when they speak of Gebel, it sounds to me very much like the way Christians would describe heaven. Of course, Ibn Fattouma’s journey is very much like a pilgrimage to the promised land. It makes it even more relevant because of the setting of the story: most pilgrimage centers and holy sites are in the middle east, where the Journey of Ibn Fattouma apparently takes place, whether it is in our universe or an alternate universe.

I think traveling is often, or perhaps always, a pilgrimage, defined as, “a long journey or search of great moral significance.” In this story, certainly Ibn Fattouma’s journey is a pilgrimage: he is searching for utopia, searching for a morally satisfactory region. I think often when we travel we are searching for moral significance, even when we’re just going on a short vacation to the beach to unwind. We may not think we’re looking for moral significance then, but usually we’re looking for a sort of meditation period and in my mind that has a great deal to do with moral significance. Meditation is the act of purifying the mind, and it is “often for the purpose of self-transformation”. So I think all traveling is partly a pilgrimage. 


After reading the first two paragraphs of Erik Cohen’s "A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences," I got ready to choose a side of the issue, but found that my opinion fell somewhere in the middle. As I read on, I realized that that the author’s opinion and mine essentially aligned. We both believe that tourist experiences vary and that instead of arguing over the meaning of tourism, perhaps we should argue about the different types of tourists. He goes into great detail analyzing his five modes of touristic experiences, which I don’t disagree with. However, I believe each tourist travels with uniquely different intentions and has different experiences and reactions, and touristic experiences cannot be separated into five groups.

I think the nature of the tourist experience depends on the traveler’s intentions. It seems obvious to me that if a traveler is going to a country to experience a new culture, to try to immerse themselves in the culture without judging, they are different than a traveler who is only visiting a foreign country because it’s something they think they should see: looking at the surface without digging deeper. It seems more important to focus on the individual traveler than to generalize traveling by saying each tourist wants the same things out of travel.

Despite the tourist’s intentions, however, I don’t think it’s easy to be a “good” traveler, the kind that I mentioned first: one who is in search of understanding in a new culture. It’s easy to fall into the tourist traps, to see only what the tourism department wants you to see. It takes less planning and can cause less stress, but the big reason why one may stick to the well trodden path of tourist attractions is for fear of being too fully immersed in a foreign culture. I believe setting foot in a foreign country gives forth immediately a strange feeling, one of unbalance. A tourist grasps onto things that will ease them into the foreign land (such as a hotel or any place frequented mostly by other foreigners), whereas an ideal traveler, despite their fears, doesn’t hold onto anything from home, and lets themselves settle into. I think most tourists fall somewhere in the middle on most trips. It depends on where the tourist is, whom they are with, their intentions for the trip and how they are feeling at the time.

The travel novels we read in class are helpful when discussing because they all showed different types of travelers. Each protagonist has a different motive behind their travel and a different result because of it, so they illustrate my point. Port in the Sheltering Sky is a pure traveler, one who easily gives up all sense of home, and someone like Winterbourn is on the other side of the spectrum, despite his being an expatriot, not willing to be immersed in a culture other than his own.

I think all tourists and touristic experiences are unique, and I certainly don’t find tourism as a whole objectionable. I do however, prefer certain tourists, those who don’t disrupt the culture that they are visiting.

“In The Comfort of Strangers, realization dawns on Mary and the reader that she and Colin are in serious danger but neither she, nor the reader are prepared for the obscene horror of what actually takes place.” - Christina Byrnes, Ian McEwan -- Pornographer or Prophet?

The quote above is very accurate to how I felt when I read the book.  I was expecting something awful to happen.  I knew there was something seriously wrong with the situation, but I did not expect anything so disturbing and shocking as the scene of Colin’s murder.  I think this speaks to Ian McEwan’s talent as a writer:  he weaves a story of realistic characters and realistic travel experiences with a horror story of sadism, stalkers and sexual predators.  To me, the way Colin and Mary travel seems so realistic, as do their conversations and their feelings about being away from home.  They seemed similar to my experiences traveling, which is why the ending was so shocking for me: in my experience, traveling is always somewhat surreal, and the traveler’s point of view may be slightly skewed, so everything can feel a little off, but things don’t end the way it ends for Colin and Mary.  In the Comfort of Strangers, the tone of the story changes drastically: realism turns into a fantastical horror story.

If the reader is so surprised and shocked by the ending primarily because of Ian McEwan’s plot development and writing style, why are Mary and Colin so surprised that Robert and Caroline are as evil as they are?   There are so many warning signs, so many reasons that Mary and Colin should have stayed away from Caroline and Robert.

On the surface, Robert is a little strange, he’s a bit too forceful, but he’s a foreigner, he has a different culture, and consequently a different understanding of the world.  Because of this, Colin and Mary, though they find him strange, also find him interesting.  If they had met him in their native country and he was a fellow countryman, they would have seen the warning signs much earlier, but because they are in a foreign country, social rules are different: behavior that is unacceptable in their country is not acceptable in Italy and vice versa.  They are much more lenient with Robert because they are non-natives in his land.

Colin and Mary go back to Caroline and Robert’s home, despite the fact that they know they should not.  They are confident enough that they can fix the situation that Caroline is in; they believe they are part of a society that knows better, and they look down on the society that would allow something like this to happen.  This is why they do not fear the situation.  They don’t truly respect this other society, and they certainly don’t respect Robert; they don’t see him as an equal and don’t believe he is able to cause them any actual harm.  Traveling can make the traveler feel superior because the traveler is not part of the society that they are visiting.   When a traveler witnesses something morally wrong in the foreign society they can always say, “this is not my world, this is not my society,” and distance themselves from the faults of the society.

Robert and Caroline are not what they seem.  They are truly living a double life: they seem to fit into society, but in reality they are sadists, murderers searching for their victim.  Colin and Mary are a masked couple as well, they often hide their emotions fromeach other.  It may have saved Colin’s life if they had revealed their suspicions and fears earlier.  They also act differently with Robert and Caroline than they do by themselves: they pretend to like Robert and Caroline even when they find them disturbing and repulsive.  Each couple has their secrets that they conceal from society.

Obsession and travel seem to be inseparably linked in the travel novels that we’re reading. In Death in Venice especially, the protagonist’s obsession leads him to stay in Venice much longer than he had anticipated, which causes his death from the Indian cholera. In Daisy Miller, in the Sheltering Sky, and the Sun Also Rises, if not in the other books we’ve read, the main characters deal with obsessions also, though not as prominent as in Death in Venice, which is essentially about obsession. In the context of Daisy Miller, one could argue that Winterbourne is obsessed with Daisy: he follows her to Italy and he seems to think about her unceasingly. In the Sheltering Sky, Port is obsessed with losing himself in his travels, obsessed with escaping from everyday life. Kit also has obsessions: her belief in omens is so strong that it keeps her from thinking rationally. In the Sun Also Rises, Cohn is obsessed with Brett, and Brett has her obsession with Pedro Romero. Moreover, all the characters seem to be obsessed with alcohol.

Aschenbach, or as is he also referred to in the story, the traveler, is fatally obsessed with a young boy by the name of Tadzio whom he sees whilst on vacation. He never speaks to the boy, but watches him constantly, even goes so far as to follow him on several occasions. It’s up for interpretation whether Aschenbach’s feelings towards the boy are of a sexual nature. In my opinion I don’t think he is necessarily sexually attracted to Tadzio, but it’s clear he is obsessed with Tadzio. Obsession is defined as “the domination of one’s thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire.”  At one point, Aschenbach is attempting to leave Venice but cannot bring himself to, and then he is forced to acknowledge that he is staying in Venice solely because of his desire to be around Tadzio.

How is obsession related to travel? I think because the traveler is in a situation where they are immersed in a completely different culture, they often feel lost, vulnerable and at the same time attracted to this new exotic world. Often when one is traveling all the rules are thrown out the door, because the traveler is not in their society, so they don’t have to follow their society’s rules. This can lead to a situation like that of Aschenbach and Tadzio, both foreigners in Italy. The situation is not usual for Aschenbach: his obsession with a young polish boy comes completely by surprise.

Obsession and travel seems like an unusual pairing. In reality it may be rare to have the two together, but in fiction it is a common occurence.

Neal Cassady (left) and Jack Kerouac

The protagonists in the Sun Also Rises, the Sheltering Sky, and On the Road are all strikingly similar.  The authors of these novels all paint their characters as being rather hopelessly lost, searching for life through their travel.  Interestingly and tellingly, all three novels were based closely on the lives of the authors.

These stories are all based on reality.  People like these characters really existed and had these experiences, living the lives of travelers.  The real people behind the characters were writers, writers who traveled to gain experiences.  The job of a writer is to see the world and to learn from the world, and then they write down what they’ve seen and learned.

On the Road, however, is about as close to an autobiography as a work of fiction can get.  There is a chart on the On the Road wikipedia page of the real-life person’s name translated to the character’s name.

Dean’s real life counterpart was Neal Cassady.  Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady were just like Sal and Dean.  The original sentence of On the Road was, “I first met Neal not long after my father died,” and was changed to “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.”  Neal was married to a young girl named LuAnn Henderson right after he got out of prison, just like Dean married Marylou after his stint in prison.  Write what you know, as the saying goes.  Cassady and Kerouac were close friends, and they traveled the country together.  They both died around age forty, as so many of those authors did, after living hard lives drinking and abusing drugs.

Neal Cassady, a writer who never published a book, was nevertheless a huge part of the Beat Generation and an inspiration to many of his artist friends.  On his wikipedia page, Neal Cassady’s Legacy and Influence section is filled with the songs  and short stories written about him.  Clearly in On the Road, Dean is shown as an idol of Sal’s.  Dean is the hero of the book, the real protragonist.  The way Sal presents him is similar to the way Nick presents Gatsby in the Great Gatsby.  Other than Kerouac, Neal also influenced Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead.  Though not a successful writer himself, he inspired many who were successful artists.

It seems that a writer is either relatively reclusive or has a close circle of writer friends, who share ideas and edit each other’s writing.  The personalties and experiences of the members of these circles of friends provided bases for the fictional works of writers like Kerouac, Hemingway, and Bowles.  I find it fascinating to look at these groups of artists who gathered together and formed movements, as Jack Kerouac and his friends formed the Beat movement.

More on Neal Cassady:

Beat Museum

Letter to Kerouac

Kit, Port, and Tunner are, on the surface, dislikable, flawed characters.  I mean, they’re very flawed.  Port sleeps with an Algerian prostitute who tries to steal his wallet, basically just because he can, despite the fact that he’s trying to reconnect with his wife and improve his marriage.  Tunner tries to steal his closest friend’s wife, or at least, sleep with her, because “he’s was a man, and she was a woman.” (page 248)  As for Kit, well, if you’ve read the end of the book, Kit’s flaws hardly need to be pointed out (there are times when you just want to shake her!) but Kit has these fantastical omens that put her into horrible moods that make it impossible for her to be a decent person.  Not to mention those intense eyes that express her flaws so clearly: “the piercing, questioning violence.”  Then of course, all three are purposely cruel and purposely manipulative to each other.

However, I find all of them to not only be fascinating characters but even likable.    The way they interact with each other is completely realistic to me.  The book is one of those that when you read the dialogue your stomach sinks because you know how real the conversation is, and its not a pleasant conversation.  You read it and want to tell each character how uncompromising they’re being, how much miscommunication is occurring.  Maybe this is pessimistic, but thats usually the feeling I get when I listen to people having conversations in real life, or at least married couples.  What does marriage do to you that causes you to purposely miscommunicate?  Oh well, that’s a topic for another day.  

I like Port and Kit a good deal, despite their flaws.  I identify with each of them, and especially identify with Kit.  (Tunner is not necessarily developed enough as a character for me to relate to him.)  This is why I find the book so dismal as it progresses.  The last section, “The Sky,” I found almost unbearable to read because of Kit’s downward spiral.  She is completely changed, oblivious to the world and she let’s herself be used brutally.  I don’t know how much of what happens in the later book (the rapes, the marriage to Belqassim and the way she has begun to throw herself at men) can be called her fault, and it’s possibly irrelevant.  I sympathize with her and see her as a victim.

After Port dies, Kit blocks out everything about western culture that she remembers.  What I find slightly perplexing and very interesting is the way that she behaves with men.  Its as if she has no expectations or fear of them, as if she can’t remember how she used to behave towards men.  She reverts to a childlike behavior almost; naive and desperate.  The men take advantage of her, of course, but she’s mostly willing.  Not that she’s not entirely a victim of sexual assault and of rape, because she is, but she’s not really bothered by the fact that she’s raped.  In fact she even enjoys some of it and showers the men with affection.  I can’t completely understand her transformation after Port’s death but her behavior is mostly a result of an attempt to block out the memories of Port’s death, which is key to the story because in effect she blocks out the west and embraces Algerian life, not wanting to be found and to return to her “home.”  She becomes the ultimate traveler in a way, getting lost in her surroundings forever.

I have to admit, I have a lot of respect for Paul Bowles as a writer and also I love this book.  I can hardly pick out flaws in the text, to me it’s almost perfect.  I love the slow building of the story that begins with the first chapter (Port’s strange awakening from a dream, trying to remember where he is) and ends with the two main characters lost to the world in different ways.  Almost everything is foreshadowed, the plot makes perfect sense, despite the fact that each part is so different from the others.