a detour on our own. Thus we might say that reading fictive worlds teaches sympathy born out of interruption. Practicing a willed suspension of our own world, we enter the otherness of a new world, thinking and feeling as another. Journeys are thus intertwined, and we carry in our minds the crossed paths of self and other.
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While Eva's personal hope is symbolized by the socialist dream, Stevie's journey begins at the personal level and expands toward a vision of universal quest through imagistic association with animal and plant worlds and the significant relations of this life. The longer light of spring, accompanying the boy's quest for a place and for the knowledge that he is connected with others by love, points to the metaphysical depth of the story. Through the settings of junkyard and cemetery, journeying becomes a metaphor not only for the living but for the hopes of the dead, whose memory sparks the present search for meaning and for a feeling of continuity.
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The journeys of Olsen's characters are marked by struggle and community. Employing the quest as a leitmotif of American literature, the writer revitalizes its metaphoric potential by offering an unlikely set of vehicles: the poor, minorities, women, and children. The incoherent chantings of an old Jewish immigrant woman, the vision of an eightyear-old girl or a fourteen-year-old boy, the desires of a povertystricken woman, balancing a baby on her hip, a union sailor, reeling drunk, whose quest he no longer understands: these are the people whose journeying Olsen depicts as the essential human quest for freedom, place, and meaning. She makes us feel the desire ''for mattering" from their perspectives and shows the springs of hope flowing, almost miraculously, from their lives. These questers come in groups, struggling together as family: mother/daughter, husband/wife, friend/ friend. The black church in "O Yes" is emblematic of communal journeying, where everyone is brought along: the old, the sick, the infant.
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In her notes, Olsen has written, "In the human being is an irrepressible desire for freedom that breaks out century after century." 10 In her fiction she shows that desire to be not merely for freedom from want, hunger, and fear, but freedom
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