At times The Accidental Tourist presents its self as a gentle comedy. This is shown by the characters humour: the ineffectual Macon and the Brash Muriel, Edward the Neurotic dog, the eccentric Leary's and Julian the playboy courting Rose the old fashioned romantic. There is the amusement value of situations like Macon's method of washing clothes, the impenetrable vaccination', and the disastrous thanks giving turkey. Anne Tyler sees the joke in the human behaviour, and presents it in a way that allows the audience to become engaged and laugh at the characters. But there is more to the novel than just jokes. Under the surface, it is an often sad book. Most of the characters seem lost, searching for something that eludes them- wether the memories of happiness or yearning to belong.
In the accidental tourist Anne Tyler depicts the views each character has on the world. In the sharpest focus throughout the novel is Macon's view, based on the need for control, the fear of change, distrust of others. In his view the world is worse than alien, it is dangerous. His destabilising childhood experiences, his vocation, the trauma of Ethan's death all conspire to justify his fight from the world. As Sarah put so poignantly, when she confesses to the view that people are basically evil', what makes him intolerable is that he always believed that anyway.
Sarah a one time optimist turned cynic by the brutal murder of her only child has crossed over form the company of those who love life to those who fear it. Perhaps her vision, so sadly tainted by experience, touches us even more than Macon's. Unlike him, she is a character who never makes us laugh. There are no humorous obsessions, no irritating habits to distance us from her sad and all too recognisable loss of faith. We are directed to Muriel's world view by the logic of the story. Macon and Sarah's views cannot help them. Macon descends into something close to a breakdown before being rescued by Muriel. Sarah seems to have scaped by getting away, but at the end of the novel she is a pale shadow of a women, fearful, clinging to a memory of her husband, a hollow person. As Macon finds himself senses when he listens to Sarah's perfect gramma, after listening to Muriel's broken English.
The Leary's are no better, behind all the crazy habits, the alphabetical tins and the indecipherable vacation game, lies Tyler's sly argument that these people have some how missed out.
A traveling pilgrim deeply connects and explores the cultures they visit in the same way a spiritual tourist explores life's meaning and significance. In this way, spiritual pilgrims are made unique by their desire to find life purpose. As Falson's life begins to fall apart, he finds new life purpose through the study of St. Francis's Christ-like lifestyle of poverty and generosity. A reader can especially make this connection as Falson washes the genitals of a poor man and the impact it makes on him. Pilgrims studying history search for the purposes and deeper implications of each past event. They seek not just to know the facts but also their deeper
Sarah and her mother are sought out by the French Police after an order goes out to arrest all French Jews. When Sarah’s little brother starts to feel the pressures of social injustice, he turns to his sister for guidance. Michel did not want to go with the French Police, so he asks Sarah to help him hide in their secret cupboard. Sarah does this because she loves Michel and does not want him to be discriminated against. Sarah, her mother, and her father get arrested for being Jewish and are taken to a concentration camp just outside their hometown. Sarah thinks Michel, her beloved brother, will be safe. She says, “Yes, he’d be safe there. She was sure of it. The girl murmured his name and laid her palm flat on the wooden panel. I’ll come back for you later. I promise” (Rosnay 9). During this time of inequality, where the French were removing Sarah and her mother just because they were Jewish, Sarah’s brother asked her for help. Sarah promised her brother she would be back for him and helped him escape his impending arrest. Sarah’s brother believed her because he looks up to her and loves her. As the story continues, when Sarah falls ill and is in pain, she also turns to her father for comfort, “at one point she had been sick, bringing up bile, moaning in pain. She had felt her father’s hand upon her, comforting her” (Rosnay 55).
Anne Taylor's The Accidental Tourist, set in the late twentieth century United States, explores the belief that the loss and suffering of kids is the force behind other losses. Taylor is able to illustrate the exponential amount of her main character's development following the death of his son and the loss of his marriage. The loss of the main character's child illustrates the continuous struggle to discover oneself and repair one's life after a tragedy. Taylor's ability to depict the return of those broken by the world allows one to reflect on their internal happiness. 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.
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
The students of Du Bois’s essay characterize one of which fits as a “simple tourist';. Du Bois said,
...d her secrets upon her death. Through her self-imposed isolation, she was able to live a life in which she was not a lonely spinster woman, but a life in which she slept every night in the embrace of her one true love, Homer Barron. While the life she lived may have been based in her own madness, for her, it may have been a rosy life indeed. However, a life experienced through the shade of rose-colored glasses usually presents a somber reality. Herein, lays the danger of succumbing to a life experienced only through a rosy hue. The individual is unable to sense their own descent into madness, and those watching are loathe to recognize the tragedy that has befallen them all.
In “A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid written in 1983, she intensely expresses her belief and annoyance about the tourist at the first sentence of the quotation: "That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain”. "The native" here implies herself and she explains that tourism is all about people finding a way to leave from their routine life and enjoying themselves, yet every tourist is a native of somewhere. People who live in their native place seem to be boring for them but for tourists that place are very attractive. In my experience as a native of my hometown and as a tourist, I disagree with Kincaid's argument. She is very subjective and biased since she does not reveal the tourists side of the story. She pulls people
Mrs. Mallard’s repressed married life is a secret that she keeps to herself. She is not open and honest with her sister Josephine who has shown nothing but concern. This is clearly evident in the great care that her sister and husband’s friend Richard show to break the news of her husband’s tragic death as gently as they can. They think that she is so much in love with him that hearing the news of his death would aggravate her poor heart condition and lead to death. Little do they know that she did not love him dearly at all and in fact took the news in a very positive way, opening her arms to welcome a new life without her husband. This can be seen in the fact that when she storms into her room and her focus shifts drastically from that of her husband’s death to nature that is symbolic of new life and possibilities awaiting her. Her senses came to life; they come alive to the beauty in the nature. Her eyes could reach the vastness of the sky; she could smell the delicious breath of rain in the air; and ears became attentive to a song f...
Introduction: The novel Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan follows the hapless journey of twelve Bay Area tourists destined for Burma, accompanied by the ghost of their dear friend Bibi Chen, who died under “mysterious circumstances” just before the departure. The journey continues in a downward spiral until eleven of the tourists go out on a misty lake one morning and disappear. Miss Chen, the omniscient voice of the book, is caught between two worlds and is along for this journey. It isn’t until the end of the book that readers realize many events that occur are actually a metaphor for human relations; and the central theme is that the line between reality and fantasy can be tricky to discern, and things can be vastly different from
In “A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid, Kincaid criticizes tourists for being heartless and ignorant to the problems that the people of Antigua had and the sacrifices that had to be made to make Antigua a tremendous tourist/vacation spot. While Kincaid makes a strong argument, her argument suggests that she doesn't realize what tourism is for the tourists. In other words, tourism is an escape for those who are going on vacation and the tourists are well within their rights to be “ignorant”, especially because no one is telling them what is wrong with Antigua.
The narrator’s journey into insanity is caused by her husband isolating her from societal influences and also the long period of time in which she was imprisoned without anything or anyone to stimulate her intellect. While some critics may claim that she was insane upon entering the mansion, it is clear that she was able to think and reason well and be able to hypothesize during the first few weeks of her confinement. By feeling demoralized and useless in the presence of her husband, and also not being able to vocalize her own treatment options, she slowly became the incompetent women that needed her husband to dictate her life. In the end, she escaped the realism that she felt was holding her from expressing herself and became an individual not scared to express what she was to her husband.
Susan, the protagonist in “To Room Nineteen” feels trapped by her life and her family, and afflicted by her husband’s infidelity. Everyone assumes Susan and her husband are the perfect couple who have made all the right choices in life, but when Susan packs her youngest children off to school and discovers that her husband has been having an affair, she begins to question the life decisions she has made. Susan chooses to isolate herself from her own family by embarking on a journey of self-discovery in a hotel room that ultimately becomes a descend into madness. Unlike Susan, the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” initially wants contact and interaction with people, but is
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 breathtaking saga of a young girl’s tragic memories of her childhood. As with Ellen, Gibbons’ parents both died before she was twelve-years-old, forming the family. basis of the plot and themes of this novel. The fond memories she possessed of her mother and the harsh ones of her father are reflected in the thoughts and actions of Ellen. The simplistic and humble attitude that both Gibbons and Ellen epitomizes in the novel is portrayed through diction and dialogue.
She continues in this sequel to talk about the abuse she faced and the dysfunction that surrounded her life as a child and as a teen, and the ‘empty space’ in which she lived in as a result. She talks about the multiple personalities she was exhibiting, the rebellious “Willie” and the kind “Carol”; as well as hearing noises and her sensory problems. In this book, the author puts more emphasis on the “consciousness” and “awareness” and how important that was for her therapeutic process. She could not just be on “auto-pilot” and act normal; the road to recovery was filled with self-awareness and the need to process all the pieces of the puzzle—often with the guidance and assistance of her therapist. She had a need to analyze the abstract concept of emotions as well as feelings and thoughts. Connecting with others who go through what she did was also integral to her