Asia

Asia is the destination of John Marcher’s extended journey after May Bartram’s death, but it offers no recovery of the past he seeks. Its scenes of romantic interest and sanctity become a stark measure of his loss: instead of restoring his former sense of distinction, the journey leaves him convinced that he has become ordinary, and turns his attention back toward May’s grave in London.

Place in the Journey

After an hour at May Bartram’s tomb, unable to penetrate the secret of her death, John Marcher sets out on a journey he intends to make as long as possible. He reasons that the other side of the globe may have more to suggest about his lost consciousness than the familiar world. His eventual stay in Asia lasts a year, during which he spends himself on scenes he regards as romantically interesting and supremely sacred. The journey is therefore not presented as a sequence of detailed encounters with particular sites; its importance lies in the expectation Marcher brings to it and the disillusionment it produces.

Marcher’s View of Asia

Marcher finds that the places and experiences he encounters cannot restore the distinction he once felt his private knowledge gave him. Looking back on his former state of mind, he sees it as a light that had coloured and refined the world around him. Beside that remembered light, Asia’s glow seems to him garish, cheap, and thin. The judgment describes Marcher’s altered consciousness, not an independent account of the region: he now feels common himself, and consequently sees what surrounds him as common too.

The contrast reaches even the temples of gods and sepulchres of kings. In moments before them, Marcher’s sense of nobility turns instead toward the barely distinguished slab in the London suburb where May is buried. The tomb has become his one witness to a past glory, and the grandeur associated with Pharaohs cannot rival its personal significance for him. Asia’s sacred and historical associations thus intensify, rather than displace, his fixation on the grave.

Return and Narrative Significance

Marcher returns to May’s tomb the day after his arrival back from Asia. The months away have not supplied an answer to the secret she kept; instead, distance has made the grave more central to his sense of himself. He has accepted what he understands as his extinction and feels drawn back to the one place that still connects him to the lost distinction of his past. Asia functions as the broad setting of this failed search: the farthest journey carries Marcher no closer to knowledge, while making plain how completely his inner life remains bound to May and her tomb.