Travellers’ Stories: Lived Mobility, Survivor’s Guilt, and Explorer’s Relief in Wamariya’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads and Strayed’s Wild

Abstract

This dissertation provides a comparative analysis of involuntary movement and voluntary travel, and the contrasting effects and lasting outcomes of both trajectories, through Clemantine Wamariya’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads (2018) and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012). This Research serves as a bridge linking mobility to context by contrasting voluntary and involuntary journeys, a comparison scarcely considered in previous studies. Theories and concepts, including Cresswell’s theory of mobility and space, Bruner’s storytelling, O’Connor’s survivor’s guilt, and Spencer’s survival of the fittest, were used. The research looks into how both memoirs convey the controversial meanings of mobility and its ambiguous aftermath. It determines that Clemantine Wamariya’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads reveals the burden of travel in war and survival contexts, while Cheryl Strayed’s positive accounts of her journey capture the transformative nature of travel through her personal rebirth in her memoir Wild. The comparative analysis of these stories communicates the importance of viewing travel in different lights, namely; survival, struggle, trauma and loss.