Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Kincaid’s A Small Place

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Main body
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Travel writing is quite longstanding genre in the world literature, but it is still very popular among readers from all over the world. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across Italy, India And Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert and A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid are two pieces of travel writing, revealing the idea of travelling from the different angles and representing quite opposite stories.

Main body

These two books depict different places, thus they are regarded as travel writings, but focus on totally opposite issues. Elizabeth Gilbert describes her travelling through three countries, where she tries to find conciliation for herself after personal dramas: she divorced with her husband and in a little time had to endure painful broke-up with another man. The whole story is “built on the notion of a woman trying to heal herself from a severe emotional and spiritual crisis” (Egan, The Road to Bali.). Gilbert continuously implies to the suicidal thoughts, which she is trying to leave in her past, and find herself in the places, created, in her opinion, for this kind of search. She tries to find pleasure for her flesh in Italy, pleasure for her spirit in India, and, finally, she seeks for balance between these pleasures in Bali.

But, as far as Kincaid’s narrative is concerned, she describes one “small place” of her birth Antigua, which is a famous resort. But her story is not that of funny tourist who seeks for pleasures and escape from boredom, Kincaid starts with the description of Antigua from touristic point of view. And she addresses the reader as if the reader were a tourist, here Kincaid expresses contempt and anger towards tourists: “An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that…” (Kincaid 17) Kincaid dislikes tourists because they don’t and don’t want to understand the inhabitants of that or this place, for what is good for tourist sun and heat turns in draughts for inhabitants, who suffer without water and money, they are doomed to live in paradise but in poverty. She considers the tourists from the point of view of inhabitant of Antigua, who are very poor and simply envy those tourists who visit their place. Apart from depicting the beauty of the place Kincaid reveals the other side of the island life with its poverty, stagnation and even slavery, for people of Antigua are slaves of English customs, their poverty and their own government.

While Eat, Pray, Love is an amusing story with interesting characters, some funny situations and quite cheerful atmosphere, revealing inner thought of a traveler looking for balance in his soul; A Small Place is a serious and even critical narrative about inner life of people on an island with its grave problems. And this makes the great difference between these two writings. The former depicts the story of a person well-to-do and even prosperous, who is looking for some spiritual balance. Gilbert describes her own inner world against a background of picturesque places of Italy, Indonesia or Bali. She is quite unhappy and uncertain in the beginning of her travel, and she finds her balance and, moreover, she finds her love in the end; in this trip she reaches all the goals she put to herself. She doesn’t think of some problems of the inhabitants of the places she visit, she only sees what she wants to see, beauty, pleasure, spirit and balance. On the contrary, Kincaid is focused on the life difficulties of the people of Antigua, she describes the beauty of the island nature, but she depicts the ugliness of people’s life there. She condemns the tourists, like Gilbert, who only evoke envy and contempt in the minds of inhabitants. Kincaid depicts the social life of the island, where people don’t think about balance in their spiritual world, they only seek for money, for food and water. She also reveals the situation with library, which is old and really needs some money to be restored. She mentions her mother, trying to find some financial help for restoration of the library, thus, Kincaid stresses that people of Antigua also need and want to have some spiritual support, like library and schools (for example, the library was a kind of escape from the reality for Kincaid); they want to reach balance, but they can’t afford it.

Conclusion

Thus, being two travel writings these two books maybe opposed to each other. On the one hand, Eat, Pray, Love is a story of a traveler who seeks for reaching peace within her soul, and shares her feelings and situations she experiences during her travel. Here the author is amusing herself and her readers. On the other hand, A Small Place is a narrative of an inhabitant of an exotic resort who depicts the serious problems of the people of her place of birth. And here the author expresses her thoughts about different aspects of life in Antigua. These two books are a very good example of how it is possible to implement a travel genre from two different points of view.

Works Cited

Egan, Jennifer. The Road to Bali. The New York Times. 2006. The New York Times Books.

Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York, NY: New American Library, 1989.

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Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Kincaid’s A Small Place

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