Journey

Journeying is an especially predominant motif in Parable of the Sower, metaphorically and physically transporting Lauren and other major characters from one point of the novel or state of mind to the other. There is the obvious coming of age journey that Lauren undertakes, wherein a fourteen-year old girl from a sheltered life develops into a pessimistic yet hopeful young adult. The development of her religion and entries in her journal seem to chronicle her maturation process; as she progresses, her thoughts become more complex and her feelings about others, the world, and so on alter with her changing needs. Laura personifies change as she adapts to the changes going on in the world and begins to realize that she has the ability to accept or control event around her, from people being mugged or murdered before her to the fires that ravage California.
The actual journey in Parable of the Sower gives a better perspective of American dystopia: fires, burglary, drug use, murder, climatic decay, etc. As Lauren recounts the past through the stories of her parents and other adults and travels from the previously safe fortress of her community up north, the audience takes a journey through time, from a time where there is relative security and a sense of normalcy to a time where fundamental institutions such as justice and community are torn asunder. To some extent, the nation itself undergoes a journey through time wherein the nation digresses and may continue to crumble, going withershins as apposed to progressing. The overall journey across America parallelsa the traditional  trans-American story in a distorted, pessimistic view of the nation.

Lauren’s journey north itself also recounts the heritage of African American slaves making the journey north to escape slavery or the progression of pioneers into the American west. In California the only prospects for the poor are indentured servitude or actual slavery or employment in the corporately owned city of Olivar, a reinvention of sharecropping in which the workers are intellectuals and the crop is knowledge. In the north, on the other hand, there is the prospect of freedom without walls and self-reliance, a romanticized portion of the world that, in comparison, is relatively untouched by the chaos of the outside world.

Space travel also plays into this journey motif. The process of traveling to other worlds, much like the characters’ progression north, represents the process of obtaining the means for improving life. With the death of an astronaut and the foreclosure of the space program, however, dies any hope of colonizing and reviving the vitality of humanity.  Lauren, however, does not give up hope on interstellar travel and, instead, preserves on earth yet vows that her Earthseed, the fate of humanity,is destined for the stars.