In the very first chapter of How to Read Literature like a Professor, Foster goes on to discuss the
very typical event in a piece of literature of going on a trip. The chapter is
aptly named, ‘Every Trip is a Quest (Except when it’s not).’ His claims at what
makes a trip a quest are valid and make sense and are applicable to most pieces
of literature. For most character in stories that I have read I never really
thought all that much about how each place they went impacted the specific
character. I sort of just went along with the plot and any short or seemingly
unimportant movement from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’ never really stood out to me,
I sort of saw it as just that, a character moving from one place to another.
When I actually took a minute to stop and think about some of the trips the
character have taken in assorted novels, I began to realize how many of these
seemingly unimportant trips actually held a great deal of meaning and character
growth.
One example, from the well-known novel Harry Potter, is Harry’s train ride to the magical school,
Hogwarts. (Disclaimer: I might spoil something if you haven’t read the books so
don’t read this if you haven’t read the novel) To give a short summary of the
events, Harry boards the train and as it is going from the station to the
school, it is stopped and a group of magical beings called dementors board the
train and harass the passengers. Now Harry ultimately escapes and gets to the
school but the trip has a lot more meaning than first meets the eye. In Foster’s
book there are five things that must be present for a trip to be a quest, the
first is a quester (Harry), the second is a place to go (Hogwarts), the third
is a reason to go there (it is Harry’s school), the fourth is the challenges on
the way (a flock of dementors trying to suck out the souls of the students),
the fifth and most important aspect is the REAL reason to go to the given
location. Now this one is a bit harder to answer because the actual answer is rarely
given in any novel, however Foster says that the real reason always involves
some aspect of self-knowledge. In Harry’s case there are a number of things
that he learns about himself, one is how much he cares about the school and his
friends in his willingness to fight the monsters, another, perhaps more important
discovery is he learns that dementors are his greatest fear, even more so than
the villain in the series. The discovery of his fear is not shown in full until
later in the series, but the train event foreshadows the later event and also
just shows how terrifying some things in the magical world of Harry Potter can
be!!!
These are dementors! Look at how freaky they look!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here are a few more articles that elaborate on this topic in Harry Potter a little bit more
and one that talks about the importance of trips in literature and how they are designed
