Literary Journeys

Paul Theroux has said that perhaps the oldest form of storytelling is that of travel. One can imagine the need very early on to relay information amongst a group in order to describe where food, shelter, water and danger were, by one who had been beyond and seen. Literary journeys can be traced back to early beginnings with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the works of Homer and the Bible. Tales of travel developed into stories of enlightenment and self-discovery, with the journey motif as its framework. In the 20th century a new kind of personal journey arose, expressed by Jack Kerouac in his statement that ‘the road is the journey.’