The Individual vs. the Collective Theme Analysis

In the beginning of “Journey,” the unnamed narrator emphasizes the power of the individual. Free from his nagging family members on his solo trip into the city, he believes he will succeed where others in his family have failed and will be able to convince the city planners to let his family subdivide the land they have lived on for generations. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes obvious that the narrator values the collective far more than the individual: since his childhood, his family’s bonds have allowed them to survive hard times. In fact, this is the reason the narrator wants to subdivide his land in the first place, so that his 11 nieces and nephews can build their houses and live next to each other. Ultimately, the city planners deny his family this dream, and the narrator returns home to sit in his room alone and contemplate his death. With this ending, the story equates individualization with death and collectivity with survival.

At first, the narrator places a lot of emphasis on the power of the individual. Resisting the way his family treats him as an old man, he thinks to himself as he boards the train that it was a “good idea coming on his own, he didn’t want anyone fussing round looking after his ticket, seeing if he’s warm and saying things twice.” At this point, the narrator feels a sense of freedom in his independence from his nagging family members. Because of this independence, he believes he will be able to succeed in convincing the city planners to let the family subdivide their land. “If he’d gone on his own last time and left those fusspots at home he’d have got somewhere. Wouldn’t need to be going in there today to tell them all what’s what.” As an individual, the narrator believes he has more power to change the family’s situation than the family does as a collective. The story therefore begins by suggesting that the narrator values individuality more than collectivism.

However, it soon becomes clear that the collective unit of the family holds much more meaning in the narrator’s life than the individual.  When the narrator enters the railway station in the city, he remembers that it was where “people came [...] in the hard times to do their starving. They didn’t want to drop dead while they were on their own most probably. Rather starve together.” For the narrator, being together in a crisis, such as extreme food insecurity, is far better than the certain death of being alone. The family survived these “hard times” by working together on their garden. The narrator remembers helping out in the garden alongside his siblings, growing “great looking veges” and taking them into town to sell, trade, or give away. In this way, the family’s collective work on the garden not only ensured their own survival, but also supplied food to their extended community. The fact that the narrator missed school a lot to help in the garden reinforces that for his family, the individual pursuit of education was secondary to this collective struggle for survival. Additionally, the main reason the narrator is traveling into the city in the first place is to try to ensure his family’s collective survival on the land. He says to the city planner, “no sense in being scattered everywhere when what we want [...] is to stay put on what is left of what has been ours since before we were born. Have a small piece each, a small garden.” In the narrator’s plan, the family will survive, as they have for generations before, if they are able to stay on the land together and grow food. Being “scattered,” disconnected from each other and unable to grow food on their land, makes the family’s survival far more precarious in the narrator’s eyes. For the narrator, being part of a collective means survival, while being alone means possible death.

The story’s ending again equates being alone with death, as the narrator, unable to prevent the city planners from taking his land away, returns home to sit in his room alone. After hearing that his family will not be able to stay on the land together, the narrator feels alienated from the people around him. He does not confide his thoughts to his nephew, George, to the taxi driver, or to the rest of the family. With the unemotional final lines of the story, he stops sharing his interior mind even with the reader, who is left to wonder what he is thinking about as he “[sits] for a long time looking at the palms of his hands.” This shift suggests that the narrator is experiencing a deep sense of isolation. As compared to the beginning of the story, when being alone connoted a sense of power for the narrator, this new, deeper isolation from family members pairs with the narrator’s newly apparent fear of death. Afraid that the proposed construction project will unearth his bones, he tells his family, “When I go, you’re not to put me in the ground [...] burn me up I tell you, it’s not safe in the ground.” Stripped of the hope of his family’s collective survival, the narrator resigns himself to dying alone, his body vulnerable even after death.

In the narrator’s worldview, true power comes not from acting alone but from acting as part of a collective. Therefore, in denying the narrator’s family a collective future on the land, the city strips them of their power and decreases their chances of collective survival. Thus the story directs readers’ attention to the ways that the powerful use division to maintain the status quo.