The essay is an invitation to students. The speaking voice invites their students to “travel” with their mind, to experience, that is to be. In the same way, in Tennyson’ s dramatic monologue, Ulysses invites The Victorians to go away from the island and from their orthodox conventions, as he did. His voyage made him know what is the real essence of life, it made him come in contact with new cultures, which influenced him (“I have a part of all that I met”), as the consequence he could explore world and his voyage represents everyone’s voyage to reach knowledge. Tennyson’s poem and others make the reader reflect on his/her life, because book make you think according to your past experiences and indeed “literature requires active reading and participation”. Everyone reading will interpret a literally text in different way, indeed there is not a “definitive answer” and just one answer is more true than another, every your answer is true and adapt to yourself. Only experiences make a human being “human”.

Ulysses says “As tho’ to breathe were life”; the Victorians (the “savage race”) live according to utilitarian trend of thought and puritan one, as a result they think life is hoarding, sleeping, feeding that is breathing and having. Hamlet put himself the question “to be or not to be”; Ulysses in his drammatic monologue and the teacher in his essay invite readers/students to “drink life to the lees”, that is being, exploring and knowing what there is “beyond the sunset”, beyond your “personal island”.