'Every Trip Is A Quest' By Thomas Foster

The first chapter in How to Read Literature Like a Professor: a Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Line by Thomas Foster, that I was able to draw a parallel with was “Every Trip is a Quest”. Within this chapter the author explains how the standard creator may loosely base their writing around the design of a quest. As a result, the author starts with a character who orders another to journey somewhere, to retrieve something, and then the character comes to a revelation about their life in the greater scheme. Foster stresses the importance in the knowledge that these minuscule errands the characters always seem to detect a growth in self- knowledge. Additionally, Foster introduces the concept of a standard pattern, he describes

Finally by the end of act two, the reader catches that the trip to the Capulet party has now become the quest for a forbidden love. However, Foster made another brilliant argument; “You don’t believe me. Then why does the stated goal fade away? We hear less and less about the will and the estate as the story goes on, and even the surrogate goal, the mystery of the postal conspiracy, remains unsolved” (Foster 5). Remembering back to plot in Romeo and Juliet, Romeo states that his objective in traveling to the party was to rendezvous his ex- girlfriend - Rosaline. “At this same ancient feast of the Capulet’s, Sups the fair Rosaline whom thou so lovest…” (Shakespeare 11). After he arrives at the party his initial intention seems to disappear, and thereafter the party, we never learn of the name Rosaline again. Subsequently, when any reader understands this pattern that so many writers use, noticing it within other works of literature will be fairly