A Travel Through a Travel in Margaret Atwood’s “A Travel Piece”

What is a travel? Moving from place to place, exploring new countries, people, food, smells? Enjoying magnificent vistas, relaxing, escaping from reality, running away from everyday life? Or is it the opposite – the way to find reality, to explore and attempt to get to know one’s inner self? There is no one unanimous answer to any of these questions, though. We can try to find them in little bits and pieces discovered by philosophers, poets, artists or writers. As an example we could take one very intriguing attempt made by Margaret Atwood in her short story “A Travel Piece” (Dancing Girls, pp. 130-143).
Here, the main character Annette is a professional traveler; she earns her living by writing about what she experienced during various trips offered to ordinary tourists. She happens to be on a plane, which crashes and then she ends up in a life boat with five other survivors who are waiting to be rescued and are suffering from heat, thirst and hunger in the middle of the oce...