Who Are Some Famous Fictional Travellers?

There are many famous fictional travellers, and I have listed some below:

• Lemuel Gulliver
• Sal Paradise
• Ryan Bingham
• The Pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales
• Odysseus

Lemuel Gulliver

Perhaps one of the most famous fictional travellers, Gulliver was the narrator and main character of the novel by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver's journey started in 1699 and ended in 1715, and during it, he came across different places and people, who each taught him something about himself, and the world around him.

Sal Paradise
Salvatore 'Sal' Paradise is the narrator and main character of Jack Kerouac's novel,  On The Road. Sal goes on a journey across America with Dean Moriarty in a search for freedom.

Ryan Bingham Ryan Bingham is the lead character in Walter Kirn's 2001 novel, Up in the Air. Bingham is trying to reach one million frequent-flyer miles, a number only achieved by nine other people.  It takes him six days, as he passes through eight cities to become the youngest person to ever reach the target.

The Pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales The Pilgrims, from Chaucer's fourteenth century collection of stories, are travelling together from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn, upon their return. 

The tale of the pilgrims, a knight, a cook, the wife of bath, a clerk, and a monk (among others) tells an engaging story of how travel can bring strangers together.

Odysseus
Homer's The Odyssey, tells the tale of Odysseus's journey home, after the fall of Troy.  It takes him ten years to reach home and during his absence, his wife and son believe that he is dead.

Apart from the fictional travellers mentioned by other Blurtit users, there are also others who have been overlooked - those who feature in some classic children's books, and who travel in unexpected ways.

Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time was one of my favourite books when I was a young child.

As the title suggests, this book features a main character, Penelope, who travels not just in the normal sense (of moving from one place to another), but also back and forth in time, between the present day and the Elizabethan era. 

I also loved Madeleine L'Engle's children's sci-fi novel, A Wrinkle in Time, which also deals with time travel, or - in the case - the wrinkling of time.

Then we come to C.S. Lewis's wonderful series of children's novels, The Chronicles of Narnia, in which the Pevensie children travel backwards and forwards between worlds - mainly between our own and the land of Narnia.

However, in one of the books of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Magician's Nephew, there are glimpses of many alternative worlds, which the main characters slip into and out of, via the "wood between the worlds".

More recently, there have been two hugely-successful series of children's books, both of which have dealt with the subject of travelling between different worlds.

The first is J.K. Rowling's series of novels featuring Harry Potter, in which Harry and his friends travel between Hogwarts School and their normal lives by train, which they catch from a concealed platform at King's Cross station - Platform 9 3/4.

Ordinary people, or muggles, as they are referred to in the books, aren't even able to see this platform, let alone access it.

The other recent publishing phenomenon (of a series of books for children which featured travelling - or slipping - between worlds) is, of course, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

In these novels, the main characters, Lyra and Will, travel through a series of parallel universes, against a truly epic background of events.