What is the American Journey?

The American Journey is a metaphorical or literal journey to a stable identity and away from reality. It is the ability to make a future for one self without being constrained by society, class, religion or the government.

The whole notion and idea of America and the American Dream is exemplified as a journey from the grim realities of the old world to a place where you can be remade as something new and better. The idea that it is an “escape” implies that your given life or identity or the world you come from is bad or constricting. It implies a flight from repression to freedom. This idea became the most important part of the American Journey and was the basis of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the sentiments of the original founders and settler of America.

The American Journey focuses heavily on an escape, a running away from somewhere bad, it is the pursuit of freedom where ever it can be found and in what form you desire. You don’t know where exactly you are going but you need to get away and become free. That was originally what the escape to The New World and The Frontier was. It was an attempt to escape the confines of a repressive government and to make a name for you by giving a name to an other place. It was a journey to the frontiers of society and the known world and an attempt to tame it and colonise a new perfect world. In the early days of the colonisation of American it was an attempt to found a New Jerusalem away from the evils of Old Europe. Through out the journey experience will be gained that will enable the person to create themselves again based on their experiences and thus will enable them to achieve their version of the American Dream. Experiences of the journey will embellish and determine who you are and fill in the gaps of your character. However this implies that the person that you become at the end of the journey is someone inherently fake; a fraud or a phoney, maybe even a dream, or something that isn’t tangible and wont last under close scrutiny.

Your identity is who you are and the specifics of what define you. It is where you came from and your ideals and ideologies. It is what makes you different from everyone else and what makes you uniquely you. Through the American Journey you need to get to the other part of America in order to find yourself and find out who you are, or reinvent and refashion yourself into someone better and more complete. It is when you create your own identity and where you remake yourself. You forget the person that you are and become or try to become someone different. You create a different image that you project upon the world.

The novel The Great Gatsby focuses heavily on the Journey. Both of the main character are on their own personal journey throughout the novel. Gatsbys is tragically cut short before his is able to end in his own particular Dream but there is always the possibility that Nicks long journey resolved itself into making his dream reality.

Nick is lonely and lost at the beginning of the story because of the personal changes that he has gone through since his return from The Great War. He came back restless and soon lost his mid western well-to-do identity. He initially goes east in order to gain experiences and forget the realities of his former life as a member of a clan of whole sale hardware sellers.

However he stops being lonely when he helps someone find East Egg. From then on he saw himself a native of the east. He compares his situation with the situation of the early settlers and imagines his future set before him as comparable to the grand future of America. The promise of his future is the promise of an untarnished pure version of the American Myth. The Journey and the Dream combined. “I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler”. The original American Dream was to tame the wild frontier and become a settler out west. Nick has changed this around in his mind and gone to tame the wild frontiers of West Egg, perhaps implying that it the east that is now the unknown frontier of society.

Nick says the novel occurs “in my younger and more vulnerable years,” which suggest that he has hardened him self against something. He has gained much experience as has grown and matured and has changed since the events of the novel. Nicks personal journey is not complete at the end of the novel and his move out East to New York is only the first stage. At the beginning of the plot he has lost faith in finding any inner goodness in people. Even though he knows that how a person acts and why may be influenced by their experiences or their birth but after a while it doesn’t matter. This is how Nicks personal Journey progresses through the novel. He begins by wanting the world to be uniform and unchangeable; he wants it to be knowable and understandable and above all moral; he wanted a persons character and identity to be clear cut and to be able to be inferred from first impressions or pre conceived ideas about birth or status but instead he met Gatsby and his personal journey continued.  

Gatsby may have represented everything that to Nick is bad but because of the strengths of his personality Nick finds himself wanting to know him. However Nick the narrator believes that by the end of Gatsbys life he has moved on past the things in him that Nick scorns. “Gatsby turned out all right in the end”. Even in the short episode of Gatsbys life that is shown he is shown to have made a journey himself.

Nick the narrator believes in the importance of the journey in determining what type of person you become. He says “A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.” He believes that some people are better then others but the status of a person’s birth doesn’t determine the type of person they are or who they will become.

He reserves judgement as a matter of hope that a persons private journey has expressed upon then some sort of inner goodness. This is what allows him to become close with Gatsby. Despite the person Gatsby appear to the world Nick finds himself holding judgement until he sees his true character. “I am still a little afraid of missing something”, that something he is afraid of missing is the inner sense of goodness that Gatsby or any one has achieved through a long Journey.

Nick comes to believe that if who you are and the type of person you are is based on a series of good gestures and morally good experiences then there is something inherently good about you. Even though Gatsby represented certain things that nick scorned there was still something about him that was fundamentally good. Nick believes that Gatsby has a very optimistic belief in the American Dream and the happiness that will be achieved at the end of the American Journey.

Gatsby may engage in some dubious activities but he is fundamentally a good person. Gatsby had a “heightened sensitivity to the promise of life.” Through his life experiences and his Journey Gatsby has retained an optimistic outlook that things will work out alright in the end. Gatsby has hope and so too does Nick by the time he has come to narrate the story. What really impressed itself onto Nick was Gatsby’s belief in the American Dream. Even at the end he maintains his dignity and hope and belief in the American Dream and the Promise. It is the prejudices and the close minds of people like Tom that Nick hates and that ultimately helps to conclude that part of his Journey by making him close himself off from the sorrows, hardships and elations of men.

Gatsby created his own identity after the experience of his younger years and the disappointment of the way his relationship with Daisy ended. His life before he appeared in New York is relatively unknown and there are numerous speculations and stories. He had essentially managed to escape from the confines of his former life and created a new persona. He ceased being James Gatz and became Jay Gatsby. He may have escaped the associations of his poor past and created an identity with all the traits of a rich person but he still hasn’t managed to be able to act like a rich person.

He is aware of all the stories about himself but he doesn’t care. He has made no effort to stop the rumours or set them straight. He uses the stories, rumours and parties to give the impression that he is someone different from the person he was born as. He hopes that the stories will make their way back to Daisy so that she will think that he is more on her social level.

Gatsby refuses to believe that he cannot regain the idealised past of his relationship with Daisy. The Journey to him can only end with his future becoming like the past. To Nick it is the attempt to achieve the Dream that is important. It is the journey not the destination.

The novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn features the characters on a metaphorical and literal American Journey to find freedom. Unlike The Great Gatsby, which only shows an episode from the journeys of the characters, Huckleberry Finn shows a journey that is almost complete. Huck is like Nick. They both leave and are forced back to their home towns, for Nick it took many years, while Huck achieved this in a matter of weeks. Huck however is not trying to regain some imagined past that he believes to be perfect. He is trying to escape from a present that is too controlling.

When Huck finally decides to escape the civilising influence of the widow, the cultured religious influence of the Judge and the abuse of his father he makes a decision to break with society. The river represents freedom to Huck and Jim. Contact with society brings bad things that slowly come to represent society; every time they land something bad happens to them or they encounter bad people. They spend the length of the novel and the length of the river trying to remain separated from society and all the evil trappings of man. Hucks escape attempt becomes a metaphorical journey across the American consciousness to find himself and a literal journey across America to the freedom of the west and the frontier where him and Jim can be free. It is the American Dream and the American Journey in action.

The beginning and end of the novel are Twain looking back into an idealise past that he tried to recapture with the childish exploits of Tom Sawyer after the fairly dark story of Huck and Jim. They represent uniquely American experiences of children living in freedom and innocence without responsibilities. It is the sort of American Dream that adults wish for their children and for themselves when they were younger. It represents the desired situation after the Great American Journey has finished.

Because of their freedom from responsibility, Huck and Tom are able to create any type of life they wanted. There are numerous layers of different identities in the final sections. They are able to achieve through their play acting the change in identity that is desired from the American Journey. Huck, Tom and Jim have re-created themselves as Tom, Sid and an escaped slave. On top of this are their fairytale escape plans and their lie to the doctor. They are several times removed from reality. Their escape from reality has disregarded the notion that a new identity has to be earned through experiences. A new identity can be gained as easily as telling a story.

They are escaping from reality both metaphorically and literally. The real escape from the farm is also a fairytale escape from a castle. The fake escape to the Ingean Territories is a mask to cover their real escape from their lives to an idyllic life on the river.

The idea that the American Journey is a quest or a mission implies that there is a given target somewhere to aim for, or that it is a task given from some higher power, such as god or destiny or the annals of history and that there will be an overcoming of difficulties and a complicated journey. Tom appears to be on such a quest in the last section. He is taking on a task from the higher powers of literature and notoriety. They are given guidance and ideas and beliefs in how the escape should be going and how to achieve their goal by Tom vast but confused knowledge of literature and historical escapes. He displays a disconnection from reality. His only reasoning for what happened with Jim and the escape attempts was that he “wanted the adventure of it”. To Tom it doesn’t matter to him the reality of the situation; he will always try to invent more outlandish and intricate plots. Maybe this shows that even the people who have accepted living in society still need to escape and find their own way.

Even though the original attempt to escape to the frontier ended in failure for Jim and Huck their journey has not ended. There is still the possibility that Huck will make it to the frontier. Even so, he is not going to be the same boy as when he left. That section of his journey has ended but he hints at the possibility of more to come. In The Great Gatsby Nick believes that it is Gatsbys innocence and hope for a better life that makes him so special. Jim and Huck both share this trait with him. Even though Gatsby has glimpsed his perfect dream life in his past with Daisy while Huck is chasing an imaginary future he has no idea about they share the same idealism. For Gatsby the journey was a way to reclaim a version of the past, while for Huck the journey was the ultimate goal.  Gatsby aims for an idealised past, while Huck and idealised future. For them both America is a place where they can make dreams reality, where the given reality of your birth and identity are not constrained and where they can take on any form that they desire; or to paraphrase George Bush; where the nations makes hope, and where dreams take wings.