Life as an imaginary journey from life to death

Life as an imaginary journey from life to death is the preface’s governing account of travel and fiction: the journey is not a route to dependable discovery, but an imaginative passage that runs from life toward death and beyond life. Its acknowledged unreality is not a weakness; it is precisely what gives the journey its strength.

Travel and Disappointment

Travel is said to be useful because it exercises the imagination. The claim is immediately set against a bleak qualification: everything else brings disappointment and fatigue. The value of travel therefore lies less in what an actual journey might deliver than in the imaginative activity it makes possible. The concept turns away from the promise of travel as uncomplicated pleasure or fulfillment.

The Imaginary Journey

The journey is described as entirely imaginary, and that fact is presented as its advantage. The people, animals, cities, and things encountered along it are likewise imagined. By naming these varied elements, the preface extends fiction beyond invented characters: the world of the journey, in its human and nonhuman life as well as its built environments and objects, belongs to the act of imagining.

The preface calls the journey a novel and a fictitious narrative, invoking Littré as an authority for that description. This insistence makes the concept self-conscious about its own form. Rather than asking the reader to mistake fiction for factual travel, it identifies imaginative construction as the condition that allows the journey to proceed.

From Life to What Lies Beyond

The journey’s direction is explicit: it goes from life to death. Yet its destination is also described as the other side of life, extending the image beyond a simple itinerary toward a boundary that ordinary travel cannot cross. The concept binds the novel’s imagined movement to mortality while leaving that far side as a threshold, not a described territory.

Read together, the claims make fiction a passage made by closing the eyes rather than by mastering the world outside them. The journey’s imaginative character and its movement toward death belong to the same design: travel exercises imagination, and imagination carries the narrative beyond life without presenting that beyond as an empirically known place.