I started reading Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor almost directly after finishing Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, so you can imagine my delight when the first chapter became immediately relevant to me in its correlation with my reading. It's always refreshing when summer homework is relevant. The first chapter of Foster's book is about the Quest, and Narcissus is almost entirely about one man's journey in finding himself. That sounds like a quest to me.
Foster makes the assertion that every time the protagonist hits the road, so to speak, he is going on a quest, a journey of self-discovery. He says that these journeys are usually undertaken for the purpose of completing some sort of task that is ultimately irrelevant to the lesson learned on the quest. In Hesse's book, Goldmund is the coming-of-age youth whose journey the story follows. Struggling to break away from the Catholic Church that he was raised in, Goldmund undergoes revolutionary self-discovery: he learns to follow the call of his mother, he learns the struggle of death and survival, and he learns that he is an artist. On this journey, Goldmund learns things that he never would have learned any other way. Wandering made him realize that he was born to be a wanderer.
Goldmund's journey was certainly a quest, and its nature helped me relate to Foster's descriptions, but it had some inconsistencies with Foster's quest requirements. Foster says that the quest is always initiated by another person who issues a task. This is true to an extent in Goldmund's case; his friend and mentor Narcissus awakened Goldmund to his need to leave the cloister, but he was given no trivial or otherwise "task" to complete. He knew from the start that his purpose in leaving was to find himself, he just didn't know what he would find. In addition, although Narcissus inspired the change in Goldmund that made him want to leave, Goldmund ultimately made the decision himself and broke away and started the journey without being told to do so.
Although these points are significant structural differences, Goldmund faced the personal battles and practical difficulties that any quester would. There may not have been a desired task or destination from the start, but Goldmund returned to the cloister a far different man than he was when he hit the road. It seems to me that a lot of quests in literature are self-driven; just because the decision to leave was personal doesn't mean that internal change can't come from it. Foster's requirements seem to fit the more fantastical/Harry Potter type quests; whereas Goldmund's alternative can be seen in more subtle novels of youth, such as "On the Road". I would consider Keroac's tale a quest, despite the fact that Sal made the decision to travel on his own for no other purpose than vacation. Foster's ideas imply that the quester is too immature to go on a journey for the sake of the journey or understand its implications from the get go.
Keroac's story of a quest is further explored in this post: http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/rebirth-kerouac-on-the-road.html , which gives a quote from the book that I find relevant to this chapter:
“Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts, but ‘IT–‘ Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.”
–Jack Kerouac (1957), quoted from On the Road
The lesson I learned: the key to a quest is the self-discovery part; if someone hits the road and returns a changed person, he had been on a quest.
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