Research Paper on:
Around the World in Eighty Days by Verne

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obsession. Accompanied by his servant Passepartout, an Indian princess he rescued named Aouda, and followed by an earnest detective named Fix, wealthy Phileas Fogg vows to circumnavigate the globe  on a bet with some fellow club members, and vows to pick up his winnings of twenty-thousand pounds in London on December 21, at 8:45 p.m., exactly eighty days after  his departure. The texts action is centered around accomplishing the impossible during a time frame, which was, in 1872, mind boggling, to say the very least. Verne  was a talented writer whose great knowledge of world geography served him well in a book that can be equally enjoyed by readers, young and old. He created a  fantasy of world travel that was not only imaginative, employing unique uses of transportation, but was actually quite prophetic, since American journalist Nellie Bly actually accomplished this feat in an  amazing 72 days just seventeen years later (Ruddick 1). Vernes text is vivid, realistic, engaging, and most surprisingly, believable. He did not want to create an implausible adventure;  he sought not only to entertain his readers, but carefully plotted out his literary journey with the same precision and attention to detail as his protagonist, Phileas Fogg.  Phileas Fogg is the central character, without whom there would be no novel, and yet out of all the characters in Around the World in Eighty Days, his is the  most enigmatic. In the opening chapter, the narrator describes him simply as, "He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to  avoid attracting attention; an enigmatical personage, about whom little was known, except that he was a polished man of the world. People said that he resembled Byron" (Verne 1).