Three Men in a Boat - Pleasure of Traveling

"Three Men in a Boat" or traveling with style

"The world is a book and those who do not travel

read only one page." - St. Augustine

I like reading all the pages of one's book. This way the story takes shape and it gets revealed, step by step without losing sight of the main purpose. Unfortunately few are those that had the possibility to go beyond half of the globes book, this comes without saying that no one was able to read it entirely. Nonetheless traveling and reading combine in a unique symbiosis known almost from the beginning of times. Traveling has been around us for as long as we know and it is no surprise that the travel literature was closely discovered as a way to portray the aspects of one's journey. But what exactly is traveling? Well it is an act of traversing through a geographic region or moving from one place to another. This can be temporarily, as is often the case, and can be for a short period of time. And we humans tend to do that quite often. Be it from a city to a city, from a country to another or even from home to the office, traveling is a way of living.

I remember vividly the day when I took alongside me within the subway the book of Jerome K Jerome "Three men in a boat" and the impact that had upon me. It caught me immediately and made me think that I was actually traveling with the author on Thames. Immediately Jerome took place in my traveling section and portrayed the exact feeling and ideas that one might have while moving from one place to another altogether with the famous English humor.

Jerome K. Jerome is a famous and outstanding novelist, essayist, humorist and playwright in the English literature. His literary heritage includes hundreds of brilliant works impressing readers during a century. The works of Jerome K. Jerome reflect not only his epoch, but his inner world, background, life experience, socio-political views, etc. The novel "Three men in a boat", written in 1889, is constructed in a specific way which helps in the creation of the story's message. This structural and stylistic device reveals a variety of interpretations as to the meaning of the action in the novel all being transposed as a journey taken on the course of Thames.

The main characters of the story are three friends who decided to have a rest and planed a trip down the Thames. "There were four of us-George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency". The author depicts the world of countryside throughout the story, which is unchangeable, and even static. Calm and leisurely are main characteristics of that world. The novel depicts nature and discusses how beautiful it is. Nature and the theme of river in particular, are used as a symbol to describe deep personal feelings and life experience of a human. The author gives only some hints to the reader to comprehend the meaning of the novel, and under "river" and "boat" Jerome K. Jerome means our life with non-trodden paths, which we have to carve. "To those who do contemplate making Oxford their starting-place, I would say, take your own boat - unless, of course, you can take someone else's without any possible danger of being found out. The boats that, as a rule, are let for hire on the Thames above Marlow, are very good boats". Nature serves as a symbol that represents dilemma and the knowledge retrieval, the desire to find old truth. The theme of water was always one of the topical one. Human's life flows like a river, it is comparable with the rain or snow weather. Water represents life cycle of nature in comparison to the human's life.

A glorious scene of nature grasps the readers' imagination, and beauty depicted and enhanced by the author's rendering of delicate expressions that come together to form a beautiful composition of nature at its best:"From the dim woods on either bank, Night's ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rearguard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes".

The book