Essay about "journeys" stimulus booklet 2004 Text Six, 'Journeys Over Land and Sea and Text Two, Victor Kelleher's 'The Ivory Trail'

Essay by vivHigh School, 12th grade November 2004

download word file, 5 pages 4.3

Downloaded 67 times

The cover of Text Six, 'Journeys Over Land and Sea and Text Two, Victor Kelleher's 'The Ivory Trail', both convey journeys as full of suspense, and about the unknown and supernatural.

A journey is the distance travelled in a specified time from one place to another, whether this place is physical, inner or imagined. Imaginative journeys occur in a fantasy world, where the reader or character goes on the journey, and in the case of the character having an imaginative journey, the reader also learns from this experience.

The cover of 'The Ivory Trail' conveys the journey in the book as through the language and visual features. The compositional features of the text employ representations of a sphinx, a pyramid, a building with Islamic architecture, desert sands and an adolescent boy's face. These images have connotations of ancient worlds, imposing and magnificent structures and places, the supernatural, mysterious and exotic.

The image of the boy shows that he is the one actually on the journey. The choice of images establishes a relationship between them, and their connotations create the audience's idea of the genre and theme of the novel.

The blurring of the visual components brings them together and implies their connections as parts of one journey. The boy's face in the foreground is translucent and the desert sands, which stretch into the horizon, can be seen through his face. This implies that he is engulfed by the landscape and the environment that he is in, further adding to the creation of suspense as the reader wonders what will happen to him in this strange, exotic world.

The use of red as the primary colour in the text symbolizes danger, and its juxtaposition with dark colours like purple and black further enhances this danger by...