Journey To The Center Of The Earth

The story is centered around travel, both horizontal—from Germany to Iceland—and vertical—from the sea level up to a mountaintop, back to sea level, and down beneath the surface of the Earth.

The horizontal displacement functions as a traditional travel motif. The trip becomes a pretext to describe unknown, exotic locales, offering readers who are unable or unwilling to undertake the journey a taste of adventure. Being on the road also creates the opportunity to question, disregard, or transgress from established social norms and hierarchies. In his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin theorizes that an encounter on the road can be deeply transformative (Bakhtin, M. M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, 1981). When traveling, people mix freely with others from all walks of life, becoming more self-aware. For example, Otto and Axel would never get to know or spend so much time with someone like Hans in the normal course of their lives. Additionally, if they had not undertaken the trip to Iceland, they would not have met the peasants who host them or experienced so many new things.

A vertical trip, upward and downward, can be interpreted as a symbolic journey of self-discovery and self-exploration. Descending beneath the surface of the Earth can also serve as a metaphor for exploring the subconscious. Both Otto and Axel are tested multiple times while climbing the mountain and, later, going deep underground. Each obstacle reveals something new about the characters’ personalities. For example, Otto demonstrates genuine affection for his nephew but also shows his deeply selfish nature. Axel, unlike the Professor, is easily swayed by others and actively avoids confrontation. The young man is also unprepared to face his own psyche, as demonstrated by his panic when left alone in the dark.

Finally, a journey downwards is related to the trope of descending to the Underworld. In classical mythology and in various folklore traditions, the dead live in a world beneath our own. The near-death experience brought about through dehydration and the subterranean stream that Hans discovers hint that their journey is a type of katabasis—an ancient Greek term for a story of descent into Hell or the Underworld. In other such stories, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy or Virgil’s Aeneid, the protagonists must face the dead in order to achieve spiritual rebirth or deeper self-awareness. Journey to the Center of the Earth, in contrast, confronts the main characters and the readers not with deceased relatives or historical personages, but with humanity’s past as a whole. Otto and Axel discover prehistoric human remains and gain deeper knowledge about people and their role in the geological process. In contrast to the Creationist beliefs prevalent at the time, the two men must confront the possibility that humankind has existed since the Ice Age, which contradicts the Bible, the foundational text of Western culture.