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Foreshadowing
Chapter 37
Explanation and Analysis—Adventure Novel:
Set in the mid-19th century, the novel's backdrop is a world where European empires are thriving and industrialization has led to huge changes in how people work and live. This adventure novel is concerned with the human development of its protagonist through his adventures in this new world.
As European empires had grown over the past several centuries, European readers became interested in tales about far-away places that were nonetheless "European soil." What to make of a part of your home country that you have never seen? By the time Verne published this novel, it was popular to say "The sun never sets on the British empire," meaning that the empire stretched all the way around the globe. This novel, which depicts the adventure of all adventures, is an invitation to European readers to imagine not only going to one far-off place, but taking in the entire globe in a relatively short journey.
What makes this novel different from many other travel narratives, aside from the grand scale of the journey it depicts, is its interest in the question of whether industrial technology has completely changed the experience of being human. Phileas Fogg's adventure starts when he makes a bet that he can travel around the world not only at an unprecedented pace, but also on an unprecedentedly precise itinerary. There is hardly room for human error or chance in Fogg's plan. In fact, his premise is that he can travel around the world without having an adventure. As the protagonist of an adventure novel, he is destined to be proven wrong (at least in part). The novel is ambivalent about the extent to which the world has really been made smaller and more predictable by imperialism and industrialization. In Chapter 37, the ending reveals that the novel is chiefly invested, as many traditional novels before it had been, in the growth and eventual marriage of its main character:
What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey?
Nothing, you say? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men!
The idea of marriage making a character "the happiest of men" was a trope in popular novels centered on the marriage plot. Even this exact phrase appears in other novels that end in marriage. The end of the novel makes clear that as new and different as the modern world is, it is still run by many of the same institutions as ever, such as marriage. Adventure, too, is still possible despite the industrialized world's growing obsession with schedules and efficiency.
Related Themes:
