An individual's perceptions and ideas are often challenged and their views reconsidered as a result of the serendipitous nature of discovery. This fosters a unique lens of perspective which can lead to renewed and intensely meaningful understandings of ourselves and the world around us. This is depicted in Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s bildungsroman memoir ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ which details the adventures that feed Guevara’s thirst for knowledge and adventure, which subsequently shaped his perspective of the lower class proletariat. The memoir accentuates the notion that the catalyst for ideological discoveries, is the exposure to a different environment or context. Likewise, in pondering upon his childhood tendency to wander from home, the protagonist …show more content…
‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ is structured as a series of sequential diary entries, with each chapter offering a new and worthwhile moment of discovery. Coupled with the inclusion of hindsight and reflection functions as a narrative technique that helps to highlight the self-discovery made on the journey. Through the text’s subtitle ‘Notes on a Latin American Journey’ and Guevera’s acknowledgement of his limitations ‘This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic’ allows the relationship between the composer and the reader to be truthful and open from the beginning. The catalyst for Che’s discovery is the tyranny and arrangement of his ‘bitch of life’ that was ‘jaded with medical school, hospitals and exams’. This self-description embodied in his figurative language explains what Che was like prior to his self-discovery. He describes how he was quite naive before the journey which was largely based on ‘improvisation’. The title of the second diary entry ‘forewarnings’ and his reflective tone of ‘the enormity of our endeavour escaped us in those moments; all we could see was dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike’ foreshadows and encapsulates their looming discoveries and experience. In experiencing different landscapes filled with infinite possibilities an individual is able to experience ideological