Around the World in Eighty Days — themes & analysis

Verne's formal innovation in Around the World in Eighty Days is simple and complete: he invented a narrative whose entire tension is about time rather than danger. Fogg is not fleeing a villain or pursuing a prize; he is fighting the calendar. The eighty-day figure is not arbitrary — Verne calculated it from an actual 1872 article by Gaston Stiegler that compiled real transport timetables to establish whether a circumnavigation in eighty days was theoretically possible, using the Suez Canal (1869) and the American transcontinental railroad (1869) as the enabling technologies.

The margin is the novel's engine. Fogg's itinerary has almost no slack. Every incident that delays him — the rescue of Aouda, Passepartout's forty-eight-hour imprisonment in Bombay for violating a temple, the storm that holds the steamer back from Hong Kong, Fix's arrest of Fogg in Liverpool — narrows the margin by a specific and calculable number of hours. Verne makes the calculation transparent: his characters perform it explicitly, and the chapter headings tell the reader what day it is. The reader is always doing arithmetic.

What makes this different from the danger-based tension of most Victorian adventure fiction is the quality of the anxiety it produces. Fogg is almost never in physical danger in any dramatic sense. The anxiety is logistical — the dread of being twelve hours late to a port, of a steamer sailing at the wrong moment, of a train running two hours behind schedule. This is a new kind of narrative pressure, and it maps onto a new kind of reader: the Victorian businessman who understood schedules and timetables and knew from experience what it felt like to miss a connection.

The irony that structures the entire novel is that Fogg wins the wager because of an error he does not know he has made. Traveling east, he gains a day on the calendar he does not account for — the same day that, if he had traveled west, he would have lost. He arrives in London believing he has lost the wager by the margin of Fix's arrest in Liverpool. He has actually won by the margin of one day. Passepartout discovers it. The structural irony is precise: the man who organized his life around clocks did not notice the calendar slipping forward beneath him.

Where to follow it: Ch. 3 (the wager — eighty days stated and contested), Ch. 18 (the storm delays — Fogg calculates the damage), Ch. 31 (twenty hours behind — Fix's arrest has cost everything), Ch. 37 (the calendar error — Passepartout discovers the day).

Phileas Fogg is one of the strangest protagonists in nineteenth-century fiction, and Verne designed the strangeness deliberately. He is introduced as an enigma: a man who belongs to the Reform Club, follows a perfectly regular schedule, is wealthy with no apparent source of income, and has never been seen to feel anything. He has no visible past, no friends, no interests beyond whist and his timetable. He is a man-shaped precision instrument.

Verne gives the reader very little access to Fogg's interior. He does not explain himself. He crosses India without visible curiosity. He arrives in San Francisco without visible wonder. He rescues Aouda from a burning funeral pyre and then, on the same day, calculates whether the rescue has cost him enough time to affect the wager. He proposes the circumnavigation without visible excitement. He loses the wager — as he believes — without visible grief.

And yet the novel is clear that Fogg is not actually indifferent. He defends Passepartout at personal risk in San Francisco, after a brawl that has nothing to do with the wager. He loans money to a stranger on a train without being asked. He rescues Aouda when a rational calculating machine would have continued to the next steamer. At the end, having spent nearly his entire fortune on the journey and believing the wager is lost, he proposes to Aouda anyway — which is not the behavior of a man for whom the money was the point.

The most convincing reading of Fogg is that he is not a machine but a man who has made precision the discipline by which he manages a self that, if allowed to operate unchecked, would have considerably more difficulty navigating the world. Passepartout is the id; Fogg is the superego. The journey tests which of them the book can live without, and the answer — provided in the last two chapters in the most understated way possible — is neither. The resolution arrives in fewer than three pages and is worth not knowing in advance.

Where to follow it: Ch. 1 (Fogg introduced — the enigmatic gentleman), Ch. 13 (the rescue of Aouda — Fogg acts against calculation), Ch. 34 (arrested in London — Fogg believes he has lost), Ch. 37 (the proposal — what the wager was actually about).

Passepartout is the emotional center of a novel whose nominal protagonist appears to have no emotions. He is Jean Passepartout, former acrobat, fire-eater, gymnastics teacher, and gymnast, from Paris — now a domestic servant in London, hired by Fogg on the morning of the wager and departed with him that same evening. He is everything Fogg is not: curious, excitable, easily delighted, capable of genuine wonder and genuine fear.

While Fogg crosses India by consulting his itinerary, Passepartout looks at India. He is fascinated by the temples at Bombay, which costs him forty-eight hours in prison when he removes his shoes before entering and emerges with them defiled in the eyes of the Brahmin priests. He is charmed by Hong Kong and Yokohama. In San Francisco he executes an ill-timed somersault onto the dock. On the train across America he gets involved in a Mormon lecture, a duel between two other passengers, a Sioux attack, and an improvised rescue. He is the novel's human friction — the thing that makes the journey felt rather than merely calculated.

Passepartout's disasters are also his indispensable contributions. The opium den in Hong Kong — where Fix drugs him to prevent him warning Fogg about the Carnatic's early departure — is the scene that separates Fogg and Passepartout and costs Fogg the most dangerous hours of the journey. Passepartout, recovering in Yokohama, joins an acrobat troupe to survive, which is both comic and entirely consistent with his character. His reunion with Fogg is the novel's warmest moment.

Verne's implicit argument through the Fogg-Passepartout contrast is about what industrialization and global connectivity were doing to the experience of travel. Fogg can cross the world and see nothing because the world has become, for a man of his type, a scheduling problem. Passepartout cannot help seeing everything because he is constitutionally unable to abstract. The novel takes both seriously and does not resolve which mode is better. What it shows is that neither is sufficient alone.

Where to follow it: Ch. 2 (Passepartout introduced — "lively as Madame Tussaud's"), Ch. 10 (Bombay — the temple, the shoes, the arrest), Ch. 19 (Hong Kong — the opium den), Ch. 23 (Yokohama — Passepartout joins an acrobat troupe).

Detective Fix is the novel's comic engine and its structural irony made human. He is a Scotland Yard inspector who spots Fogg departing Suez and is convinced that Fogg matches the description of the man who robbed the Bank of England of fifty-five thousand pounds three days earlier. He is not entirely wrong in his method — he follows the evidence he has with professional diligence. He is entirely wrong about his conclusion.

Fix pursues Fogg from Suez to Bombay to Calcutta to Hong Kong to Yokohama to San Francisco to New York. At every port he telegraphs London for his arrest warrant. At every port the warrant has not arrived. The warrant cannot arrive because Fix needs British territory to arrest Fogg, and Fogg keeps being on ships or in India or Japan or America. Fix's entire strategy is to slow Fogg down enough to receive the warrant. He tries stalling in Bombay, drugging Passepartout in Hong Kong, general obstruction wherever possible. None of it works because Fogg is too precise and too resourceful.

The comedy deepens when Fix, having completely failed to arrest Fogg by legal means, decides to help him cross America because it is the fastest way to get him back onto British soil. Fix rides the transcontinental railroad with the man he has been pursuing for six weeks, assists in rescuing Passepartout from the Sioux, and is on the same ship across the Atlantic. He arrests Fogg in Liverpool with the warrant finally in hand. Three hours later the real robber is arrested in Edinburgh. Fix has spent six weeks pursuing the wrong man.

What Fix reveals is not the malice of institutions but their structural limitation: a system that operates on evidence cannot self-correct when its founding evidence is wrong. Fix is not stupid, not cruel, not corrupt. He does his job correctly and produces a catastrophic result. The novel is not satirizing the police; it is observing what happens when a good detective gets a bad tip, and the bad tip is not corrected by any of the mechanisms that are supposed to correct it. Fix's eventual apology to Fogg is one of the novel's quieter achievements — brief, sincere, and accepted.

Where to follow it: Ch. 6 (Fix introduced at Suez — the mistaken identification), Ch. 17 (Fix and Passepartout on the Rangoon — growing suspicion), Ch. 31 (Fix helps Fogg across America — comedy of reversal), Ch. 34 (the arrest in London — Fix gets his warrant, gets it wrong).