In what ways is Macon the Accidental Tourist?The logo on the front of all Macon's travel guides is a picture of a winged armchair and Macon's wife Sarah believed that this was not only the logo for The Accidental Tourist books, but for Macon himself. Julian describes metaphor of the winged armchair as "while armchair travelers dream of going places, travelling armchairs dream of staying put", and Macon does his best to help his readers feel as if they have never left home. He advises them on the best places to eat and stay, the places that are most like those in America. However, inventing these methods and systems to make it feel as if he never left home is not a chore for Macon. He does not invent the systems to help other people, but himself.Sarah is correct in claiming that the winged armchair is Macon's logo, because it does represent him - he wants to stay home, but is being moved around all over the world, and has to do his best to make it seem like home. In reality, Macon is the Accidental Tourist and the book is more a documentation of the systems he uses to get through life than a 'guide' book.
The Accidental Tourist books are less travel guides and more 'instructional guides for life', telling the reader how to live with minimum discomfort, without opening up and hiding within your own cocoon oblivious to the rest of the world. This is exactly how Macon lives every day of his life, and not just those when he is travelling. He lives his entire life trying to package himself so that nothing will change him, nothing will upset him and nothing can harm him. His books reflect this clearly and this is why Sarah considers his books so similar to himself.
The books are about Macon - The Accidental Tourist.Above all, Macon wants to control everything. He likes for nothing to be left to chance. When travelling, he only takes what he can carry on to the plane, to eliminate the risk of lost luggage, as well as taking his own travel sized soap powder so that he can clean his clothes without having to worry about foreign laundries and their detergents. His aim is to control his life - to make sure that nothing can ever go wrong, to make sure that nothing can break through his protective 'cocoon'.
This book would lure the audience of a young adult readers looking for an adventure. It is also a great wilderness and survival book. The author emphasizes the journey that Christopher takes. “Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pet, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road.” p.163. This can relate to the audience because, some people choose to live without extra amenities.
Travel was an important part of Quaker life. As a fledgling religious movement focused on the importance of introspective faith and a personal relationship with God, many Friends took it upon themselves to spread the word world-wide. Furthermore, as a group looked down upon and disliked by the rest of English society, Quakers were tempered to have a predisposition towards independence and adventure that serve...
Alexis Bunten based her information on personal experience such as working as a staff member for Tribal Tours in Sitka. She is able to provide information about how the tour guides are not at primitive as the tourist may think. Most of what the tour guides are doing is entertainment, which requires them to use commodified personas. Commodified personas can be defined as changing your character into what may be perceived by others. In the article she talks about a storyteller who is a native of Sitka who works as a tour guide. He tells a story but due to having to please the tourist he has added things in and changed the way the story is told. According to the reading “ the tourism worker expresses free choice
As humans, we love to travel and observe the fascinating world around us. We travel to get out of our home environment, the environment that we usually live in. We tend to have a goal oriented mindset in our home environment. One thinks of the home as more of a punishing then amusing. We prefer to stay at a traveling destination rather than our home. Traveling could be more tiring than staying home but we still chose to travel. The reason behind this is that we think of our home as a boring place. In the essay "on habit", the author Alain de Botton talked about how one can see their home environment in the same way as a traveler would. The author 's main purpose in advocating a traveling mindset as a way of negotiating everyday reality is to
Urry, John, The tourist gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies 2nd Ed (London, 2002).
When telling their story, the narrators clearly express their aspirations of living an adventurous life. They both view international travel as a vessel for self-discovery and meaningful memories. For example, in Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa, David Sedaris expresses his desires for life-long memories and international travel when he writes, “They weren’t rich, but what Hugh and his family lacked financially they more than made up for with the sort of exoticism that works wonders at cocktail parties, leading always to the remark, ‘that sounds fascinating’.” According to this passage, Sedaris seems to believe that money is less important than experiences and memories themselves. One is able to infer that he yearns for a life that is filled with adventures. He wants to have the ability to tell interesti...
Wallace comments that he has never understood the appeal of going to “tourist venues in order to sample a “local flavor” that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists” (5). He goes on to say that to participate in American food tourism “is to spoil… the very unspoildness you are there to experience” (5). In both of these quotes, Wallace uses deliberate language to further stress his point that food tourism ruins the local culture and flavor that food tourism exists to showcase. The use of the near antonyms “spoil” and “unspoiledness” really brings out the idea that what food tourism is doing to these local places is the exact opposite of the goal of food tourism. Wallace asserts that food tourism is bad for all of the places it touches in all ways but one: economically. He notes that even though these places of local flavor are ruined by American food tourism, they also rely on American food tourism. Wallace sums this up nicely by stating that food tourists have “become economically significant but existentially loathsome” (5). Wallace’s rhythm in this quote causes the reader to pay attention to it and think about the point he is making. His further use of the words “significant” and “loathsome” force the reader to think about how at odds the two sides of the American food tourism industry are with one another. Overall, Wallace’s powerful voice and creative techniques cause the reader to notice and understand his comments on American food tourism as well as reflect on their own opinions about it and involvement in
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid presents the hypothetical story of a tourist visiting Antigua, the author’s hometown. Kincaid places the reader in the shoes of the tourist, and tells the tourist what he/she would see through his/her travels on the island. She paints a picturesque scene of the tourist’s view of Antigua, but stains the image with details of issues that most tourists overlook: the bad roads, the origin of the so-called native food, the inefficiency of the plumbing systems in resorts, and the glitches in the health care system. Kincaid was an established writer for The New Yorker when she wrote this book, and it can be safely assumed that majority of her readers had, at some point in their lives, been tourists. I have been a tourist so many times before and yet, I had never stopped to consider what happens behind the surface of the countries I visit until I read this essay. Kincaid aims to provoke her readers; her style of writing supports her goal and sets both her and her essay apart. To the reader, it sounds like Kincaid is attacking the beautiful island, pin-pointing the very things that we, as tourists, wish to ignore. No tourist wants to think about faeces from the several tourists in the hotel swimming alongside them in the oceans, nor do they want to think about having accidents and having to deal with the hospital. It seems so natural that a tourist would not consider these, and that is exactly what Kincaid has a problem with.
A lot of tourists would not think that they are offending the native residents when they travel. In the article, “The Ugly Tourist” excerpt from Jamaica Kincaid’s book, Small Place, she argues that when one is in a state of being a tourist, one does not know the depth of the place and only sees what one wants to see. Kincaid gives a strong idea of what she is arguing when she described a tourist as “an ugly human being.” She presents the emotional conflicts between tourist and the natives by evaluating their different lifestyles.
Macon Leary is a middle-aged man who is a writer of a series of guidebooks called The Accidental Tourist that teaches businesspersons how to travel without leaving the comfort of their own homes. Macon's fascination with comfort and organization soon changes subsequent to the tragic loss of his only son. His world is flipped upside-down when his marriage of twenty years begins to fall apart. The death of Macon's son leads to the disseverment of his and Sarah's marriage because they have lost the ability to lead a life without their son. The two forget how to live a life on their own leading them to "wonder if there's any point to life" (Taylor 3). Sarah leaves Macon in order to find herself but his life is in complete chaos without the comfort of his wife. He decides to fill the void left by her departure by creating order in his life through reorganizing the house. Macon's reformation of the house does not keep him from thinking of his wife and child leaving the joy in his life is traveling and writing.
What kind of person does it take to risk everything she has and take a chance that could change her life forever? It would be a chance that could affect her physically, mentally, and financially. Most people would keep what they had and had worked for rather than risking it all. In The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver, Taylor Greer took a journey to get away from the small-town Kentucky life that she has known forever. She drives west, not knowing where she is going, but that she has to get away. Throughout Taylor’s journey, Kingsolver showed how Taylor changed, grew, and thrived both physically and mentally as time progressed.
Adventurers and travel writers all wrote works with differences in focus, theme and scope, but in the case of Smith, Columbus, and De Las Casas, the themes were similar, even if the purpose behind the argument was different.
On the surface, this story is about a man struggling to cope with the loss of his child and subsequent dissolution of his marriage. While the same remains, it is about so much more - family, loss and grieving, mental health, systems, and dysfunctional patterns. The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler, was published in 1985 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985.
Butor’s tone used throughout the text is lax enough for the reader to genuinely connect with his ideas, since the typical traveler usually vacations in order to escape the daily stresses of their normal routine. In doing this, he portrayed his idea of what travel is meant to be with language proper enough for the sophisticated
Halloran, Anne-Marie. The Teenager's Guide to Study, Travel, and Adventure Abroad. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. Print.