Voyage and Return Stories LELE Notion

Notion Voyage and Return Stories ( Voyage, exil, parcours iniatique...)

I am going to talk about the notion of voyage and return stories.

In general, a voyage describes an adventure story where the hero discovers a life-changing experience. He can be alone but also with a group of friends or with total strangers. Also, a voyage incites these people to break up with their familiar environment in order to push their limits. These voyage and return stories are also called "robinsonades".

To discuss the notion of Voyage and Return Stories I choose some documents that we've studied in class about adventures stories. The first document is the book The Time Machine by Herbert George Wells published in 1895, the second is an extract from The Coral Island entitled “A Perpetual Summer” by Robert Ballantyne and my personal document is the novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll in 1865.

        Thanks to these documents, we may wonder about the vision of the world that voyaging offers us, and so talk about the bad and wonderful aspects of this one.

To begin, the book The Time Machine by H.G Wells allows to see the two sides of the voyage. In this book, we follow an inventor through his unfamiliar trip: having managed to build a time machine, he decides to go in the future to discover how the world has become. He is full of curiosity and thinks of landing in a wonderful world. If everything seems to interest him initially, this new world seems to quickly turn to dystopia. The Time traveller  discovers step by step the bad aspects of this fabulous world. He meets the Morlock, horrible cannibal and underground creatures, and finally wants to go home. Traveling gave him a door to a new world, different from what he used to see, but he ended up feeling trapped.

Coral island in which the heroes are british young boys, is all about dream and fascination. In the extract called “Perpetual summer” there is a particular insistence on harmony. The first three lines : «  We continued to live on our island in an interrupted harmony and happiness » perfectly illustrate what was previously said. The place is a paradise on earth with « fruit trees », a beautiful « lagoon » and a « plentiful supply of food». What is striking in a « perpetual summer » is the impression of liberty and harmony. The character sees life through “pink colored glasses” which leads the readers to live the same idyllic adventure through their eyes. The boys live a pleasant  life of leisure and pleasure in an island in which surviving is not a challenge and finding food is a child’s play.

Finally the novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland gives us that innocent worldview too.

The main character, Alice, is a girl who finds herself in a strange world of imagination and fantasy. One day, she sees a rabbit who is wearing a evening wear and running as if he is late. Curious, Alice follows him but she fall down in the rabbit hole : there, she discovers the Wonderland. All are different : cats smile, croquet is played with a pink flamingo, there are anthropomorphic creatures and a queen with a disproportionately big head. The Alice’s travel is an initiatory tale which permit to travel and discover a different world, to learn and to escape ourselves. However, for Alice, it is not only that. In fact, for that young girl, the Wonderland is her world. For her as for the readers, the sense of the tale is as much a self-discovery as the discovery of the world : strange but filled with good and bad things.

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