Journey Through the Impossible

by Jules Verne

Professors are reassuringly familiar by virtue of their daily contact with the students they help mold; a doctor is a far more independent and unaccountable being.

Both pieces end by highlighting the battle between good and evil, with the same choice for the hero-in Hoff Hann, between art and love; in journey Through the Impossible, between science and love.

The journey is strenuous; George, faced with obstacles and difficulties, is subjected to evil forces that push him to journey farther, and to good forces that protect him from danger and keep him from the blasphemy of seeking to become godlike.

Volsius tries to restrain George Hatteras from his journey, but Ox coerces the hero to conquer Earth in Act I, the sea...

In most of the novels, however extraordinary the voyage, a reader might come to feel as if an angel with a flaming sword had risen before the writer and called out to him, "No farther! Ahead is the unknown, forbidden to humans-the realm of the impossible." After

Verne wrote two trilogies; the first includes The Children of Captain Grant, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and Mysterious Island; the second comprises From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, and Topsy-Turvy (also known as The Purchase of the North Pole). Journey Through the Impossible is the only piece where so many characters from other works-including both trilogies-appear together. The first half of Jules Verne's life and work culminates with journey Through the Impossible, a mantle atop the two trilogies.

The play can be read in two ways. The first and easiest-well-received by Parisian spectators-focuses on the music, the colors, the journey through diamond caves, the Nautilus, and the colossal cannon (for travel from Earth to Altor). The more difficult reading gets at the philosophy and the message of the work: glorifying the triumphant inventions of science, but showing that science, badly used, can bring death and devastation.

doctor is a species of Mephistopheles;

The struggle between the doctor and the musician is intended to illustrate the conflict between good and evil.

He'll understand that happiness is to be found here, in family life, and God will do the rest.

Everywhere, and the strange thing is that he only stops when I go into the church. There, at the threshold of the Holy Place, he gets an even stranger look on his face. His lips are twisted with bitter irony and an angry fire burns in his eyes.

Even capable of understanding those mysteries that God seems to have reserved for Himself alone.

Young man, the vain attempts I have just mentioned may not have touched your soul. No one believes in this fictitious mythology. But open the holy scriptures

Ox (laughs): Ha ha! From the depths of the ocean, Captain Nemo wants to reawaken faith and reform our civilization. Volsius: Ah, what a wonderful civilization it is! And on what an unshakable foundation this modern society rests, a society that steals from the disinherited of this world the hope of a

better world to come. But if there is no life anywhere but on earth, if we have no expectation of any future punishment or reward, virtue is a fraud. Crime has only to find a way of skillfully evading the law. And should you happen to have a government headed by a few worthy and honest leaders who practice a gentle, bourgeois philosophy and are pleased to commute the sentences handed down by Justice, you will see the ranks of hardened criminals increase without letup. Since murder will be no more severely punished than theft, thieves will become murderers, and the murderers will say to themselves, "We can kill without fear; they won't kill us. We can cut throats without remorse; remorse is an empty word, since God does not exist."

Because he doesn't seek his life's happiness in you, but elsewhere. He only had to reach out his hand and grasp that happiness, but he scorned your love in order to realize his wild dreams.