Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor instantly enticed me into the book by its peculiar style and simple writing. Foster’s analysis and argument of Chapter 1, “Every Trip is a Quest (Except When It’s Not)”, captured my attention and made me experience many emotions. And emotions are exactly I am discussing as I use and relate to what I learned in this chapter to Pixar’s latest movie, Inside Out.
However, before I delve into that discussion, I must first explain how I feel about Foster’s argument. As an avid movie-goer, video game player, tv watcher and overall entertainment spectator, I had witnessed the elements earlier that Foster discussed in this chapter. But Foster was able to pinpoint exactly what I had analyzed and was able to organize those thoughts. Foster’s writing has a style where he always intends to outsmart you in some way and while it can be seen as somewhat humorous in a form, the humor is mainly only felt by him as the reader is left feeling dumb and unintelligent. I knew that every single story has a mission or a quest involved with similar recurring elements, as Foster demonstrated with his comparison of his made up narrative of “Kip” and a classic medieval tale. Check out tvtropes.com if you want a description of extremely common elements of entertainment and media like Foster did. Foster’s smug attitude can really just offend me at times. I recognized many of these things, but somehow he was always one step ahead of me. His somewhat subtle insult, “Your average sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old kid is like;y to have a long way to go in the self-knowledge department,” deeply hurt me emotionally and made me angry. But even after all of that, there is a style Foster posses that I truly admire. He seems very relatable, speaks in the second person quite frequently and the fact that he says “Still…” in one paragraph just seems charming and welcoming. And in truth, Foster just took me on a journey. My goal was to finish the chapter and try to act smarter than Foster. Nearly everything really is a quest no matter what as there is almost always someone and some form of an objective.
I am choosing Inside Out as a source that I can show Foster’s analysis in. There are two main stories in this film, a preteen’s emotional challenge of living in a new place and the struggles of her emotions personified inside her mind. This is a very unique case of Foster’s statement of everything being a quest most of the time. Without the emotions and there influence, as well as the journey they go on, there is no true story. The girl, Riley, is completely emotionless without her feelings so she has know personality or goal at all. It is due to the actions by her feelings, literally, that she is able to have any form of quest. This led to me to realize an important factor that I believe Foster neglected: the quest cannot happen without some form of emotion. An objective is something you desire. The constant want of your objective, when it may not be necessary can be defined as greed. However without emotions there would be no greed and thus no objective.
Foster’s case in the chapter can best be described as clever. He establishes a narrative and then opens our eyes to how common plot elements can bene. The title fits this chapter perfectly as many things can be quests but some simply are not. Foster mentions near the end “Some days I just drive to work-no adventures, no growth.” This illustrates a situation where a quest has not taken place. Foster fails to identify the explanation of this, which is that no emotion has likely taken place at all. Quests and journeys occur all the time, as long as we always are emotionally active.
