Travel Narratives from New Mexico:  Reconstructing Identity and Truth
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Travel Narratives from New Mexico: Reconstructing Identity and T ...

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they are or if what they claim to know has foundations strong enough to withstand tests by other strong claims to knowledge. Thus, the quest for self in relation to others is necessary for recovering a more informed and stable center. The trope of travel works to center the protagonists in Death Comes for the Archbishop, Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality, and Crazy Woman. However, travel is not merely movement through geographical space. Travel is also movement through psychological space, and this movement acts in congruence with physical travel as geographical experience informs internal processes. For this reason, even Tayo's limited physical travel in Ceremony is a necessary component in his experience of value, which is rooted in stories of place.

As the traveler moves geographically outward, she or he moves psychologically inward. This out-and-in motif has been applied to travel stories for thousands of years. The inward voyage, the pilgrimage archetype, and the heroic quest in travel narratives have been discussed by many theorists. The inward voyage, which Philip Babcock Gove defines in The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction, is “an archetypal form in which movement through the geographic world becomes an analogue for the process of introspection” (qtd. in Stout 14). Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) is a clear example of the inward voyage in which he explores his inner self by projecting his imagination to move from place to place. The pilgrimage archetype is a journey in which the traveler orders her or his inner self through travel. María Díaz describes the pilgrimage in “Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage,” stating, “[t]he act of making the journey involved in a pilgrimage is a ritual, and, as such, a way of bringing symbolic meaning to everyday reality by speaking to the unconscious” (214). Upon reaching the pilgrimage site, “there are specific ritual actions which the pilgrim performs in order to be in touch with the reality of the place” (214). Díaz refers to Jean Dalby Clift's description of the pilgrimage's pattern, which “points to…some holiness or value which helps ground the pilgrim in a new being, in a new lease on life, in something which gives meaning and direction” (qtd. in Díaz 215). A similar travel pattern is seen in the heroic quest, exemplified