The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“Men had no idea what it was like to be a mother. The ache of loving a child even when he had moved on.”

As Harold processes an old wound while considering Queenie’s letter, the narrator reveals Maureen has her own grief to bear. She mourns no longer having her son in the home and keeps his room spotless with the hope he might one day return. This quote also reveals the distance that exists between the couple.

“Their front gardens, however, sloped at a precarious angle toward the pavement below, and plants wrapped themselves round bamboo stakes as if hanging on for dear life.”

The author emphasizes descriptions of the natural world as Harold begins his journey. As he moves from inside his home to outside, he gains a greater appreciation of the outside world. Small things like plants and clouds become resplendent to him, and he pauses to take in their beauty. The author uses figurative language to personify the plant, which clings to the bamboo stake for its survival just as humans often cling to life when they are just one step from tragedy or disaster.

“Behind him, the estuary shone like a sheet of tin against the sun; boats were already tiny flecks of white.”

Using a simile, the author compares the water to a sheet of tin to emphasize its brightness. The boats become mere specks against the vastness of the body of water. The natural landscape highlights the protagonist’s emotional journey. The more Harold contemplates the vastness of the human condition, the more the natural world comes alive to him.

“She turned to her friend, who quietly began to sing ‘He Who Would Valiant Be.’”

This quote ties back to the epigraph, which is an excerpt from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The Christian hymn “To Be a Pilgrim” or “He Who Would Valiant Be” invokes the hallowed concept of the Christian pilgrimage, a journey toward religious enlightenment. Ironically, Harold is not religious, but the hotel guests assume his journey is spiritual in nature. Harold’s thoughts reveal that he has a complicated relationship with religion, having tried it in the past without finding any real peace.

“They believed in him. They had looked at him in his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they had made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious.”

Harold at first believes he is compelled to travel to Berwick for Queenie. Once he begins to walk and encounter others like the gas station attendant and the hotel guests, he understands the journey may be more about himself than he planned. Having spent many years sequestered in his home, Harold now comes face to face with the world and with people who are different from him, and he learns not to be so quick to judge others based on outward appearances alone, just as others choose not to mock his journey based on the way he looks and dresses.

“Maybe it was because Harold was carrying something too heavy […]”

As Harold walks, he is physically burdened by his bag, his improper footwear, and his lack of physical stamina. The more he walks, the more his emotional burdens weigh him down as well. At this moment, Harold remembers David’s first day of school. Paralyzed by self-doubt and a lack of emotional accessibility, Harold failed to give his son the support he needed. His failures as a husband and a father hang like albatrosses around his neck as he trudges forward.

“He pictured their separate beds at 113 Fosebridge Road and wondered when exactly she had stopped opening her mouth as they kissed. Was it before, or after?”

Harold’s thoughts reveal that his and Maureen’s marriage became devoid of intimacy after the unnamed event. Their lack of physical passion reflects the couple’s closed-off emotional state.

“The air smelled green and full of beginnings. […] Harold was so tired he could barely lift his feet, and yet he felt such hope, he was giddy with it.”

The author uses sensory imagery to highlight the power of nature in the story. In the first 10 days of his trek, Harold draws great inspiration and energy from the beauty of his surroundings. When he encounters a ferocious storm, it appears nature turned against him. However, once the clouds part, Harold’s emotions reflect the natural setting: He feels washed clean, refreshed, and renewed.

“‘You’re a gentleman,’ she said, spreading the word into two halves so that for the first time he saw it for what it means: a gentle man.”

Despite struggling to access his emotions due to his traumatic childhood, Harold is a sensitive person. He sees himself as a failure; when Queenie sees something good in him, it is the first time Harold receives validation that it is okay to be kind and sensitive.

“He […] thought of Martina waiting for a man who would not return. He thought of his wife, scrubbing away stains he could not see. He felt in a strange way that he understood better, and wished he could tell Maureen that.”

Harold’s journey begins to take on a pattern as he encounters strangers, and the strangers reveal something about themselves that teaches him a lesson about humanity as a whole and about himself. His encounters force him to face his long-held stereotypes about certain types of people and to confront the effects of his repressed his trauma on himself and those he loves.

“Now he followed a gentle set of stretching exercises each morning and evening, and rested every two hours. He treated the blisters before they became infected and carried fresh water.”

Harold’s respite at Martina’s provides time for his body and soul to heal. Before his collapse, he pushes his body and mind beyond their limits and takes no time or space to care for himself. Martina provides medical advice for his aching, weary body as well as space to relieve some of his emotional burdens. Back out on the trail, Harold understands the importance of caring for his physical and emotional health if he wants to complete his mission.

“There were curls of his long hair all over the bathroom. There were nicks in the skin where his hand had trembled and the razor slipped. The barbarity inflicted on that poor head, that poor head she loved to distraction, had made her want to scream.”

Maureen recounts a painful memory of her son’s declining emotional and physical state. When he shaves his head for admission into the army, it is as if he is baring his soul for her. His bald and bleeding scalp symbolizes the pain he feels inside. Seeing her son’s shorn, wounded head and his vulnerability makes his mother long to protect him.

“Harold began to understand that this was also the truth about his walk. He was both a part of things, and not.”

Harold’s journey forces him into a painful emotional cycle. When he becomes mired in grief and regret, the journey becomes heavy and difficult, and he doubts his ability to complete it. However, when he spends time with others and understands he is not alone in his suffering, he becomes less focused on his own problems and more attentive to his place in the larger world.

“Droplets hung from the stems like gems and spiderwebs were down puffs between blades of grass.”

In this passage, the author uses figurative language to highlight the beauty of nature. By employing simile and rhyme to compare the stems to precious jewels and a metaphor to compare the spiderwebs to downy fluff, the author brings nature to life and shows it to be a comfort and inspiration to Harold. As Wilf joins Harold on the journey, Harold relishes in sharing the peace and inspiration he finds in the natural world.

“For the first time he allowed himself to feel the pain of being a child that is not wanted by mother or father.”

Children who suffer from abuse and neglect often blame themselves for the abuse. With this thought, Harold reaches a critical point in his acceptance of and recovery from his childhood trauma. Once he understands he is not at fault for his mother’s abandonment and his father’s addiction, he can begin to deal with the consequences of the abuse and the ways it affected him as a husband and father.

“The hills were terrible deep giants impinging on the night sky.”

For most of Harold’s journey, the natural world is a source of comfort and inspiration to him. However, each time he sinks into a depression, he ceases to find solace in the sky and trees, and he feels nature has turned against him. In this passage, the author personifies the hills as giant beings to convey the despair and fear Harold feels in his depressive state.

“But what about your faith? I thought that was the whole point.”

Faith is an important motif in the narrative; the garage girl’s faith in her aunt’s healing is what inspired Harold to walk to Berwick. However, the closer he gets to Queenie and the deeper into depression he sinks, the more he begins to doubt his motives for walking and whether his journey will matter in the larger story. Harold’s faith is not religious in nature, but through his example, the author highlights the need to believe in something larger than oneself.

“‘I think I should leave my yachting shoes at the door.’”

Harold’s shoes symbolize the struggle of his journey. Though they were never the proper equipment for such a long trek, they stayed with him until the end. Harold sheds what is left of them before entering Queenie’s room since he is at the end of his mission. The act also symbolizes Harold’s humbling himself before the visit.

“She hung up net curtains to stop people from prying, although sometimes he felt it was more to stop herself from seeing out.”

After David’s death, Maureen devolved into denial, not wanting to accept that he was gone. By constantly wearing her sunglasses and putting curtains on the window, she closes herself off to the world and cocoons inside her grief.

“[…] Harold knew that something had passed between them which could never be undone. He had not said goodbye to his son. Maureen had; but Harold had not. There would always be this difference.”

These lines reveal the complete truth as to why Harold holds so much regret over how he dealt with David’s death and the reason why his marriage suffered so much in the wake of the tragedy. Harold’s last image of his son is of taking his dead body down from the shed. The lack of closure caused by not seeing him before his burial haunts Harold. Maureen cannot understand why Harold chose not to see David, and she views it as a failure on his part.

“The waves kept throwing themselves further and further up the shoreline. All that energy, all that power, crossing oceans, carrying ships and liners, and ending just a short distance from her feet, in a last flume of spray.”

Harold’s journey ends fittingly at the shoreline where Maureen meets him. Physically he can go no farther, yet he is also at his limit emotionally. The author personifies the ocean waves as they crash into the shore. Maureen considers the power and fury of the ocean.

“[…] and her father was calling her, or was it the good man, Harold Fry?”

As Queenie dies, her final thoughts turn to her father, an image that is muddled with Harold’s. Queenie always saw the best in Harold. Significantly, she thinks of him as a good man, something Harold never thought of himself. He thought his journey was about his belief in Queenie’s ability to live; in reality, the journey was always about her belief in the goodness inside Harold Fry.

“‘We’ll do this together […].’”

With Queenie’s death, Harold gets a second chance to have closure after a death by seeing her body. In contrast to the scene at the funeral home after David’s death, in which Maureen and Harold are divided, the couple faces viewing Queenie’s body together, unified in the acceptance of their loss. David’s death divided them, but Queenie’s death reunites them and given them hope for the future.