Honors Theses

Date of Award

2011

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Department

English

First Advisor

Ben McClelland

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, and V.S. Naipaul travel to remove what V.S. Naipaul calls their “area of darkness," by which he means those places in the world and places within themselves that are unexplored firsthand. They are much more interested in subjective impressions of the world than objective representations. In fact, these writers strive for subjectivity. But with subjectivity comes doubt and chaos, and a tool that these authors use to order their worlds and their works is the mythic method. All three of these writers are highly influenced by literary modernism and by sources across the ages, but in the end they are attempting to create new mythologies in their works using myths from any time as their foundation. These authors create personas that do the traveling in their books. These heroes are projections of the writers themselves, not factual representations. The knowledge that Naipaul, Chatwin, and Theroux seek to gain can be, and usually is, as simple as an experience that they have completely by themselves, a subjective experience that is entirely theirs. It is a brief glimpse of themselves, uninfluenced by any outside forces. Their impressions are their own personal mythologies, and in order to create these mythologies, the writers must engage in mythopoesis, the act of creating their own myths.

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