Traveling Theme in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and The Ugly Tourist Essay Example

Travel can completely transform a person. People will entirely let themselves go both mentally and physically at the opportunity to escape the monotonous notion of their everyday lives. Tourists, specifically, will neglect their responsibilities and act out of character to have the best time imaginable. In both A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and The Ugly Tourist, the authors utilize the idea that tourism invokes a loss of self-identity among people to express how traveling reveals man's ignorance and childishness. While it can be acceptable to let loose and have fun once in a while, sometimes tourists take it too far and end up regressing to an infantile state. This childishness gives tourists a bad image as they become wild, unrefined, and ignorant, which Wallace and Kincaid perfectly illustrate through their contrasting compositions. While Wallace criticizes tourists subtly, using humor, Kincaid criticizes them more directly through frustration. 

In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster-Wallace uses flamboyant, suggestive diction to convey how tourists enter into an infantile state while traveling, emphasizing travel’s power to cause people to lose their sense of self. In his humorous recollection of his 7-Night Caribbean Cruise, Wallace repeatedly reminds the reader of the similarities between tourists and toddlers. Both are greedy, impatient, incapable, and inconsiderate, which he indicates through his sarcastic account of the various incidents he encountered. One quote that suggests a parallel between kids and tourists is his account of being “the object of over 1500 professional smiles”, which kids, especially infants, would relate to with adults who flash a smile and spit baby talk at them. Wallace states that he learned “what it is to become afraid of one’s own toilet”, which presents another ingenious insight into similarities between tourists and young, unaware children. Wallace's clever writing perfectly conveys the child-like nature of tourists, especially those on cruises, showing how adults can immediately flip the switch between maturity and immaturity, consequently losing their sense of self in the process. 

Jamaica Kincaid’s The Ugly Tourist emphasizes how travel causes tourists to childishly act out through her use of a candid tone that expresses tourism's damaging impact on someone's self-identity. Kincaid's genuine writing style and candid tone expose her judgemental attitude toward tourist culture. She is straightforward with her beliefs, bluntly stating her argument that tourists are “ugly human beings''. She explains how tourists feel a sense of “displacedness”, causing them to mess with natives and their homes, in an attempt to fit in. These actions are analogous to how young children will try to act like their parents, whether it's through their clothing or how they talk. Kids strive to obtain acceptance from society and their parents, similar to how tourists want to be like natives. However, in The Ugly Tourist, Kincaid reveals how a tourist's yearning to fit in can inflict detrimental effects on both their sense of self and on the mental health of natives. Most natives feel trapped in their home country due to their lack of financial means, leaving them unable to “escape the reality of their lives”. Therefore, natives' inability to leave their homes invokes a sense of jealousy, which is comparable to the jealousy that parents may experience towards their kids. Both parents and natives long for a carefree, low-stress lifestyle like toddlers and tourists, which is why Kincaid decides to criticize the childishness of tourists with her candid tone.

Both Wallace and Kincaid represent the infantile tendency of tourists, but through their different styles, their works have contrasting effects on readers. Wallace shows the humorous connection between tourists and toddlers, which leaves the reader mocking the childishness of tourists. Contrastingly, Kincaid harshly judges the child-like personas held by tourists, giving readers an insight into the effect of tourism on both the natives and the tourists themselves. Their creative works show how tourism inflicts a loss of self-identity in tourists that sparks conflict between them and natives, who both desire to push any limits that will allow them to find an escape from their bland lives. Many tourists react to this confusing loss of their sense of self by reverting to their childish nature. Therefore, since travel is a catalyst in turning tourists into ignorant, needy toddlers, it consequently causes natives to become strict, frustrated parents in a sense.