Great IdeasStories, art and words
Journeys and homecoming
Leaving home, wandering and finding the way back.
The question
Why do so many great stories involve a journey? What do travelers find, and what do they bring home?
How the books answer
Oldest first. Each stop is our own short summary of what the author argued; follow the link to the rung for the whole lesson.
c. 725 BC (from older oral poetry)
Homer, The Odyssey
Odysseus takes ten years to sail home from Troy, facing monsters, storms and temptations. He escapes the Cyclops by calling himself 'Nobody.' The journey home is also a journey back to who he is.
“Cyclops, you ask my name and I will tell it you; give me, therefore, the present you promised me; my name is Noman; this is what my father and mother and my friends have always called me.”
29–19 BC (unfinished)
Virgil, The Aeneid
Aeneas journeys from fallen Troy to Italy to found a new home for his people. Unlike Odysseus, he can never go back. His journey is toward a future he will not live to see.
“Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore, And in the doubtful war, before he won The Latian realm, and built the destin’d town;”
c. 1308–1314
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno
Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood in the middle of his life. Guided by the poet Virgil, he travels down through Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory and into Heaven. The journey is a picture of a soul's path from being lost to being found.
“In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct ...”
c. 1387–1400
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Thirty pilgrims ride together from London to Canterbury in spring, telling stories to pass the time. The journey is real, holy and also lots of fun. Chaucer shows how a shared road brings very different people together.
“Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages ...”
1605
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part One
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza ride out across Spain looking for adventures. Each inn and road brings a new misunderstanding. Their wandering becomes a long conversation between a dreamer and a realist.
1726
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Gulliver sails to lands of tiny people, giants, floating islands and talking horses. Each strange place is a mirror that shows the faults of England and of humankind. The journey makes him see home with new eyes, not all of them happy.
1851
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Ishmael goes to sea whenever he feels gloomy. He joins the whaling ship Pequod, which sails around the world on Ahab's hunt. The voyage becomes a search for meaning in a vast, mysterious ocean.
“Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”
1884–1885
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck and Jim float down the Mississippi on a raft, Huck escaping his father and Jim escaping slavery. The river is freedom and friendship; the towns on shore are full of cons and cruelty. At the end Huck plans to head west rather than be 'sivilized.'
1899
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Marlow travels up a great African river to find a trader named Kurtz. The journey into the jungle becomes a journey into the darkness that greed and power can bring out in people. It is a story for older readers.
“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.”
For young readers
Lots of great stories are about journeys: a hero leaves home, has adventures and comes back changed. Odysseus sailed for ten years to get home. Dante walked through the whole afterlife!
Journeys teach us things: about new places, about friends and about ourselves. Even a trip to a new park can be a little adventure. Draw a map of a journey you have taken, real or imagined.
Talk about it
- What is the best trip you've ever taken? What did you learn?
- Why do so many stories have journeys in them?
- Odysseus wanted to go home. Aeneas could never go back. Which journey would be harder?
- If you could travel to one of Gulliver's lands, which would you pick?
- How does traveling change the way you see home?
Where else on the site
- Routes on a Map
- Building a Long Journey
- Narrative Writing
- Oceans and Seas
- The Mississippi River System
- Islands and Peninsulas
Every rung tagged with this idea:
These pages are our own short synthesis, written for families. They were inspired by Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon, the index of great ideas in volumes 1 and 2 of Great Books of the Western World, but the questions, summaries and groupings are ours, not the Syntopicon's. Short excerpts come from public-domain translations, credited where they appear.