The "Narrative is Travel" Metaphor: Between Spatial Sequence and Open Consequence

TLDR: For instance, the travel metaphor is a way to think about narrative; it also provides one with the means to think through narrative as mentioned in this paper, and it is universally recognized as a narrative in our culture.

Abstract: The understanding of narratives is closely tied to the experience of travel. In narrative theory, the travel story features regularly as either the model narrative or the model for narrative. In Vladimir Propp’s classic study of story grammar, for instance, the narrative functions are structured along a travel pattern between the hero’s departure and return. In more recent narratology and literary history, and in certain interdisciplinary approaches to the study of narrative, the notion of travel may even function as a code or key revealing how the narrative works. In the history of the novel, travel writing has helped to shape the genre. Narratives of travel to exotic lands have informed the modern novel with detailed foreign settings and a sense of authenticity in viewpoint. 1 Since the time of the Greek epics different types of journey—the quest, the odyssey, and the adventure—have served as powerful masterplots in literary narratives. For instance, the chronotope of the road, and the metaphor of “the path of life” that it realizes, is a central feature in Mikhail Bakhtin’s history of novelistic plot patterns and especially important for what Bakhtin calls the adventure novel of everyday life (120). The journey is universally recognized as a narrative in our culture. The narrative potential of travel lies in the fact that we recognize in it temporal and spatial structures that call for narration. The different stages of travel—departure, voyage, encounters on the road, and return—provide any story with a temporal structure that raises certain expectations of things to happen. Perhaps because of this pervasiveness of the travel narrative, we have come to understand personal life and mental development as a voyage. The travel metaphor is therefore not only a way to think about narrative; it also provides one with the means to think through narrative.