Essay Title - The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
The Accidental Tourist
Penned by Anne Tyler, the novel relates the story of one man, caged in his cocoon, unable to find the meaning of his life and the strength to deal with it when he meets a woman who has answers to all his problems, yet appears daunting and intimidating to him. It is the story of a mismatched couple, when one of them is unwilling to commit to an emotional relationship while the other, with her feisty, wild, vital nature, is ready to browbeat him into it. Macon, a travel writer by profession, has recently divorced his wife after the violent death of their son Ethan, and has moved back into his old home with his eccentric brothers and sister where he can finally lead a life with safe, unbroken routines that soothe him. After meeting Muriel Pritchett, his dog-trainer, his life looses some of the soothing regularity into which he had returned to find refuge.
Muriel, a mother of one, was abandoned by her husband and has been forced to scrape her way through life by sheer determination and hard work. In sharp contrast, Macon has been plodding through life with a grim dislike and a silent disapproval of life’s insecurities and the manner in which it forces people to step out into the unknown. Their choice of professions is enough to show their opposing natures. Where Muriel takes on aggressive, biting, howling dogs and sells box lunches on the beach to pay for her vacations, Macon hides behind the comforting familiarity of his book even while traveling to write his travel guides.
Macon, after meeting Muriel, is simple overwhelmed by her overpowering vitality and her love for life, which is in direct contrast with his glumness and his tedious daily routines. He is a man who insists everything around him stays organized. Hailing from a family where groceries are lined in alphabetical order and potatoes have always been roasted in one way only, he is in the habit of taking everyday rituals and routines as a security blanket under which he could easily seek refuge knowing that nothing could go wrong if he stayed away from unfamiliar territory. After the death of Ethan, his growing need to hide from the world in general and from his own grief in particular, forces his compulsions to stay organized within unchanging routines take the shape of a full fledged obsession. He plugs his radio, coffeemaker and popcorn machine together so that he would not have to venture out of his room daily to face the lovely sunshine of the morning but instead could stay in the gloomy darkness of his bedroom. Unable to deal with grief, he turns away from it, mistakenly thinking that it does not exist. Macon’s emotional slavery to the dreary but safe routines is symbolized by the cast that he wears as a result of his broken leg. This cast and his inability to walk without crutches shows that he is not equipped to deal with life and would rather turn his back to it than face it. His desire, that this cast “cover him from head to foot” (114), shows the alarming extent of his concealed misanthropy and his dejection. Muriel, on the other hand, is a whirlwind of energy who enthusiastically faces all the challenges life throws her way and meets them head-on. When confronted by a mugger who demands that she empty her purse and give him the money, she replies “Like hell I will!” (258) and attacks him instead.
Finding refuge in the relative safety of the humdrum of life, Macon is clearly disturbed by Muriel’s loud energy as he admits, “he felt awed by her and diminished” (258). He was a man who was passing the days of his life by “squinching his eyes shut and holding his breath and hanging on for dear life” (9). Muriel, on the other hand, was a roller coaster who offered him a chance to escape his restrictive past and breathe. Although, her “spiky pugnacious fierceness” (211) overwhelms Macon and his disallowing Muriel to train Edward anymore because he disapproved of her aggressive, though effectual, tactics, symbolizes the forceful and overwhelming tactics she employed with the owner himself. To a man as undemonstrative as Macon, she appeared a daunting woman and therefore intimidated him more than he was ever intimidated by anything. However, it was her eccentric, disorganized lifestyle that at last had a liberating effect on his reclusive lifestyle.
Throughout the novel, Macon shows a determined resistance to change. He disapproves of any element of surprise or unexpected twists in his daily routines and has a very difficult time in adjusting to the boisterous, talkative and loud Muriel as she elbows her way into his life. He is nonplussed and bewildered by her extrovert style and her easy acceptance and expression of her inner feelings. Macon’s wife Sarah also understood Macon’s introvert personality and his inability to handle his own feelings or understand those of others as she commented in the end “The trouble with you is that you think people should stay in their own sealed packages. You don’t believe in opening up. You don’t believe in trading back and forth” (298). On the other hand, Muriel not only understood his introvert nature, she decided to fight it and change.
This determination to fight and change Macon’s self-destructive ways is what set her apart from all those individuals who had once been a part of his life. Not even Sarah, his wife of twenty years, was ready to stay and change Macon’s ways. Muriel’s resolution to do so was a bewildering shock to Macon a he was not accustomed to this form of undivided attention from anyone – not even his mother whose inattention and bohemian lifestyle had driven her children to obsessive extremes of finding routine as a means of staying grounded. Muriel firmly became a part of his life despite the open disapproval of his family and despite the frequent discouragement from Macon himself. She admits without rancor, “One minute you like me and the next you don't. One minute you're ashamed to be seen with me and the next you think I'm the best thing that ever happened to you” (259). She overwhelms Macon because he finds it next to impossible to push her away like he pushed Sarah away. She accepts Macon’s faults and refuses to allow his gruff and gloomy attitude stand as a hurdle between them and resolutely continues his advances until he is ready to accept her.
She understood that Macon was not in the habit of opening up the locked recesses of his heart simply because those locks were now rusty. With her sheer determination and unshakable resolve, she directed all her energy towards prying those locks open and slowly Macon began to disapprove less and delight more. The surprising and unpredictable Muriel began to please more than upset. He began to take pleasure in her eccentric ways when once he felt at a loss as Tyler writes, “He was an entirely different person” (194). By tightening the loose screws and fixing the screens around her house, he inadvertently shows his gratitude for showing him a new life and for helping him in discovering not just the simple joys of life but also helping him in discovering himself.
As he struggles to impose order on his life that is falling increasingly out of his control, Macon realizes that he cannot insulate himself from at least one change – his growing fondness for Muriel and her son Alexander, as Macon is drawn towards him like a father. By building a relationship with Alexander, Macon is finally ready to let the ghosts of the past settle down and tries to forgive himself for the death of his own son.
Edward, Ethan’s corgi, is symbolic in the novel as he represents the rage that Macon has not allowed himself to feel, face or express. His howling and biting stands juxtaposed with Macon’s outward resignation to his fate and his inner turmoil and inability to come to terms with his tragedy. When Muriel arrives to tame Edward, she begins to tame Macon too – surprisingly soothing his inner rage and self-condemnation by her own example of acceptance of fate and life.
By her example, Muriel shows that feeling victimized by fate is not the right choice of conduct and that life should be faced head-on. Macon, however, does not fully understand the need to put up a fight till the end of the story when he realizes that the change Muriel brings with her is a weapon against the inner demons of doubt and anguish and not a whirlwind of unpredictability that so overwhelmed and embarrassed him before. Finally he accepts that he has fallen in love- probably not with Muriel herself, but with “the surprise of her, and also the surprise of himself when he was with her” (194).
Works Cited
Tyler, Anne. The Accidental Tourist. First ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002.
