The Heart of the Matter & Journey Without Maps

Journey Without Maps is a travelogue that is constructed in the manner of a personal memoir. The through line of action of the book is an account of Greene's six-week walking tour of the jungles of Sierra Leone, French Guinea, and Liberia, from the cities of Freetown in Sierra Leone to Grand Bassa in Liberia. Undertaken in the early 1930s, the journey is a literal description of what was then virtually unmapped geographical territory in European West Africa. Greene was accompanied by his cousin and by a group of native bearers or carriers, tribesmen hired for the purpose of conveying food, supplies, and, as necessary, the white travelers along the trek. Greene describes his journey in more or less linear fashion, from the time of the boat trip from England to Freetown, through the final days in Monrovia as he awaited another boat to take him back to England.

But the linear narrative is punctuated by remembrances of his travel and work in Europe in early adulthood, an important feature of Journey Without Maps for the reason that Greene's observations in Africa provide occasion for him to comment on his life prior to embarking for Africa and vice versa. Such observations becom

. . .
He commits suicide, disguising it as a heart attack, just to stop the complications piling one on the other. This very European story takes place in a culture of British 6 Africa that is explained by reference to the accidentals of physical life as well as in portraits of colonial "types" who serve the Empire in remote locales. The remoteness and difference of West Africa serve to heighten the impact-of the story. They are decisive elements of concretization of the remoteness and difference of Scobie himself, who is an anomaly in the British community because of his faith, his fundamental honesty, and the pull of priorities that work endlessly on his soul. No less significant is the fact that Scobie likes Africa, does not feel (as his fellow colonialists do) innately superior or hostile to the black population. Thus failing to receive a promotion is not a personal disaster for him as it is for his wife Louise, and the prospect of living out his life apart from his idea of the .squalid contagion of supposedly superior European civilization is perfectly congenial to him. He prefers the seedy squalor of the colonial town to the seediness of conventional civilization. Why, he wondered, swerving to avoid a dead pye-dog do
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Approximate Word count = 3347
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)