The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry Analysis

In retrospect, every person, a healthy, developing human, must go through a series of eight essential stages over the course of their entire life cycle from infancy to late adulthood (Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development). In the novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce, the theme of growth is shown through the defining characters as a way of demonstrating a new understanding of one another. It is because of a letter, that commences the protagonist’s journey through the stage of integrity in hopes of keeping Queenie, an old acquaintance, alive. Associated with this stage is a psychosocial crisis that the protagonist must face in which he successfully resolves to feel satisfaction. The protagonist, Harold, sets to …show more content…
It is evident that there are some psychological issues that Harold has faced when he was younger:

Harold Fry was a tall man who moved through life with a stoop, as if expecting a low beam, or a screwed-up paper missile, to appear out of nowhere. The day he was born his mother had looked at the bundle in her arms and felt appalled. She was young, with a peony-bud mouth and a husband who had seemed a good idea before the way and a bad one after it. A child was the last thing she wanted or needed. (Joyce, …show more content…
Recurring memories that revisit Harold are depicting his troubled childhood, “as a boy, he had tried to chew without noise. His father didn’t like to hear him masticate, as if the boy were a pain inside his head; other times he said Harold was a dirty beggar. ‘Takes one to know one,’ his mother would answer, screwing out a cigarette” (42). His question of what has made his own father and mother neglect him and what has happened before he was born because Harold just wants the caring element that a child should be provided with instead of his mother neglecting him. After disowning him, Harold’s point of the view of the world has suddenly become nothing as his mother robs him not because of her laughter, but also leaving him in the hands of his alcoholic father. As Harold grows up, the images of his past still revisit him and he ponders on how his father and himself have remained estranged for many years as his father only looked for comfort with other women but showing Harold the door on his sixteenth birthday, “ his father had presented him with an overcoat on his sixteenth birthday and shown him the door. The coat wasn’t new, it smelled of mothballs, and there as a bus ticket in the inside pocket” (137). As Harold is walking on the journey, it gives him an opening with broadening his perspective on life as well as Harold’s health improvements in the fresh