Chapter 1 -Foster's Ideas

"...We know however that their quest is educational. They don't know enough about the only subject that matters:themselves. The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. That's why questers are often so young, inexperienced,immature, sheltered. Forty-five-year-old man either have self-knowledge or they're never going to get it, while your average sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old kid is likely to have a long way to go in the self-knowledge department"

- This excerpt from page three, in How to Read Literature Like a Professor is the final step to Foster quest process. Yet for me this "final step" is perhaps the hardest for me to pick out in a novel, unless of course it is laid out for you in "the moral of the story" or the "lesson learned" as you would see in most children's books: fairy tales, tall tales, or myths. Foster basically lays out the "floor plans" for a typical quest, which seems simple enough as having a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, and challenges and trial along the way. Theses all seem rather easy to understand, and for the most part most readers should be able to give in example of a prior novel they have read and draw parallels between the two quest layouts. So, it seems fairly easy thus far, until you reach the final step, the real reason to go. In the excerpt above Foster does a nice job of laying out the basics one needs to understand before being able to identify the "real reason to go." In the prior novels that i have read, the quest (if any) is quite evident, you are introduced to the character, his desired path of travel, his reasons to go to this place, and the challenges and trial he is faced with on his way there. These aspects of the reading should be found right in the text fairly easily. Although what I have learned from this chapter in the novel, is that in order to understand the characters "real reason to go" you must begin thinking early on, "What could the character personality loose or gain in order to make them a better person?", "What was the characters relation with the person who initially sent him on thee journey?", along with multiple other things. I learned that the real reason for going on a quest may not always be easy to find, and that there are multiple things that one must consider in order to find the real reason.