The journey motif is what enables Melville’s Ishmael to assert his independence, just as it helps Huck Finn escape from the constric-tions of Southern society, an unjust and restrictive social order. This legendary motif functions as a characteristic element in the literary construction of American experience – and of the United States as a distinct geographic and cultural space. Such symbolic rendering of travel reports in the U.S. canon’s most praised fiction has been at the core of prolonged debate on American national character. Concepts, ideas, and myths that have been vital in debates on what constitutes American history – such as the fron-tier, manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, individualism, and freedom – have been analyzed as employing an imaginative language of travel, movement, and mobility.