Literary Criticism

The title partly suggests what the story is all about. This story is narrated using the first-person point of view.

This is an opinionated account. The author was trying to assert his understandings and rebut statements using examples. This further shows what man can benefit through traveling and how traveling has opened his eyes about the assertions that he is raising.

In general, this is an opinionated account of what the author has observed and learned in his travels. Other assertions show the author’s interpretation of different matters. H e further justified his assertions by giving explanations and examples.

The author is showing the positive side of traveling. It further affirms that traveling can advance once knowledge. He stressed that travelers will not be tempted to cling to his own standards. It further illuminates the capacity of travelers of quick adaptation “not blindy and not uncritically”. Readers may spot how the author has tried to use comparisons as a way to point out his assertions.

All throughout the story, readers may see the open-mindedness of Huxley through his assertions. Readers may find some of his assertions liberal narrated. His assertions are about travel as another way of obtaining knowledge. Sometimes it sounds illusionary. He is trying to attain a utopian assumption as cited in this lines, “The traveler will observe these various distortions and will create for himself a standard that shall be, as far as possible, free from them—a standard of values that shall be as timeless as uncontinent on circumstances, as nearly absolute as he can make them”.

The author asserts that “Conviction and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. He further asserts that the fruit of knowledge and experience is generally doubt. It is doubt that grows profounder as knowledge more deeply burrows into the underlying mystery…” I can see truth in this contention. It is somehow a fulfillment of the adage that says the greater we know the greater we realize that there is so much to learn. The intellectuals don’t settle for what is settled. It also means that to understand doesn’t mean to approve. He further said that “The better you understand the significance of any question, the more difficult it becomes to answer it”.

The author justified his assertions by comparing the answers of different people ranging from an ignorant man, working electrician and the philosophical physicist.

This story subtly shows the narrator’s disappointment. The narrator stressed that he set on his travels knowing that he knew, how men live, how be governed, how educated and what they should believe. He takes pride in his views on any activity of human life. With this, the narrator pictured himself as a wise man.

His failure was illuminated in these lines, “I find myself with out any of this pleasing certainties, and “My own losses… were numerous”.

He emphasized that his failure led him to earn two new convictions. One is that it takes all sorts to make a world and the other is that the established spiritual values are fundamentally correct and should be maintained. A paradox that he calls this ideas “new” yet both are as old as civilization.

Travel

Aldous Huxley

Readers may also spot how the narrator was comparing believing academically and believing scientifically. It is like scientific explanation versus learning through observation and learning. He asserted that experience is the best way to understand the meaning of proverbs. Another assertion is that man’s own opinions, one’s own way of life are alone rational and right.

The author was trying to assert some contrasting matters like travel as a way that brings a conviction of human diversity bringing strong conviction of human unity. The author asserts the variations of religion, moral codes, forms of government and society but oneness underlies this diversity. He further stress that values are everywhere broadly the same.

The narrator strongly stressed that “our standards can be demolished by argumentation; but we are none the less has right to cling to them. Another is his observation of how spirituality and materialism crept into different areas.