The journey and the destination

This novel fulfills the requirements of a journey and the separation from all things you know, but is Going after Cacciato a true bildungsroman? My first reaction is yes, and sometimes bildungsromans are about the journey. There are a million quotes about the journey being the destination, but I think in this case the quote from Don Williams Jr. is most applicable; “The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.” War is journey, the chase after Cacciato is a journey, and Paul Berlin’s self-development through his experiences is a journey. They run into a “history teller” and Paul Berlin wants his history told, but the man say Paul does not have a history yet. Paul’s mind is much like a child, wrought with imagination, hours spent dwelling on things in order to keep war from his mind. Sometimes, I feel like he does not have any character development, but sometimes not all bildungsromans are like Harry Potter, or Huck Finn, when you can clearly see, almost like it’s slapped with a label, “GROWN UP, MATURED MALE.” So then, I think Paul has not developed or changed, his continues this imaginative game of chasing Cacciato, and the accounts are so vivid, but then after Cacciato helps them escape, where does he go? If the escaped and travel, did they not get to Paris before Cacciato? All these loops holes, that make me think, maybe Paul is not so changed and grown up after all, may this journey has just been mixed along with the ventures of his imagination.