The Accidental Tourist

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapters 17-20

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Travel and Tourism

The motif of travel and tourism helps support the theme of emotional distance as explored throughout the novel. With Macon’s job as a writer for travel guides, he is regularly jetting off to different cities and countries to update the information in his guidebooks. His travel creates regular physical distance between Macon and those he cares about, which translates into emotional distance that affects Macon’s relationships.

However, Macon doesn’t feel like a tourist just when traveling. Upon returning from his trip to London, he finds he’s unfamiliar with his marital home now that Sarah is gone. He explains this disconnect by relating it to his guidebook, referring to himself as an “Accidental Tourist at Home” (42). Macon also sees his relationship with Muriel as a form of tourism, referring to her street as “the foreign country that was Singleton Street” (202) and later feeling “like someone demonstrating how well he got on with the natives” when Charles visits Muriel’s home. This motif helps to explain the distance Macon feels and maintains between certain people and aspects of his life.

Photographs

Photographs and portraits symbolize pieces of a person and play an important role in two separate chapters. First, in Chapter 5, after moving in with his siblings, Macon describes the history and backstory of a commissioned portrait of him and his siblings that hangs in their family home. This portrait is juxtaposed with lengthy descriptions of the peculiar habits and rituals that the Leary children share, such as regularly eating baked potatoes and playing a convoluted card game they’d come up with as children. Later, as they sit around the card table, Macon realizes how little of his life has changed since they were children sitting for the portrait and feels “a jolt of something very close to panic” at the thought that “here he still was! The same as ever” (78). He recognizes the piece of himself in that portrait is still how he sees his life today and becomes upset that so little has changed.

Later, in Chapter 13, photographs help reveal pieces of Muriel to Macon. As they visit her parents’ house, she shows him the photo album full of her childhood photos. Macon acknowledges that an immutable part of their relationship is their age gap by observing that all her childhood photos are in color while his are in black and white. As they flip through the pages, Macon takes in pieces of Muriel at several different ages, noting how “the chubby blonde turned thin and dark and sober and then vanished altogether, replaced by the infant Claire” (212). As the pictures of Muriel taper off, she appears to harden as a person. The sharp decline in photos of Muriel shows the way her parents lost interest in her as she grew older. At the end of the chapter, Muriel gives Macon a photo of herself as a toddler, which Macon takes to mean that she wanted “to give him the best of her” (219). Overall, photos and portraits act as pieces of a person in the past. For Macon, the portrait gives perspective on how little he’s changed, while for Muriel, the photos reveal how much she’s changed.

Edward

Edward symbolizes Macon’s unresolved grief, primarily in the novel's first half. As his marriage dissolves, Macon struggles to handle the weight of his grief over losing both Ethan and now Sarah. Edward’s misbehavior begins to escalate during this time, symbolizing the way Macon is losing control of how his grief affects him. When his siblings ask why Macon cannot get rid of Edward, Macon’s answer is simply “he was Ethan’s” (62), revealing how closely tied Edward is to Macon’s memory of Ethan. At the beginning of the novel, Macon struggles to find someone to unload Edward onto while traveling, but he eventually finds Muriel, who is willing to board Edward. This parallels how Macon struggles to unload his grief until he forms a relationship with Muriel later on.

When Macon is most intensely affected by his grief during his panic attack in the skyscraper restaurant, he calls home to learn that “Edward went into one of his fits” (155) and has Charles cornered in the pantry. In a way, Macon has also cornered Charles by demanding Charles must “get [him] out of here” (154). In the same way that Charles is unequipped to handle Edward, Charles also can do nothing to help Macon through his crisis. Edward’s behavior here mirrors Macon’s desperation for help handling his grief.

As Macon forms a relationship with Muriel, Edward’s behavior steadily improves. Parallel to how Muriel trains Edward to be a good dog, Muriel coaxes Macon out of his “capsule” and shows him how to interact with the world and handle his grief. Once Macon has resolved much of his grief surrounding Sarah and Ethan, Edward fades into the background and continues to be a well-behaved dog.