[The Long Voyage Home] is neither a war movie nor an adventure sea story. It belongs, rather, to that great class of works of art which deal with the eternal human quest—the Odyssey, the Holy Grail romances, Moby Dick, Kafka's Castle, perhaps The Old Man and the Sea. In all of them man is presented as traveling some long, weary road in order to attain a supremely desired objective. The various specific elements in the film are interpretable as expressive of this theme. They delineate the human condition—not just in the merchant marine, or in a century of war and revolution, or in any other particular social circumstances. The symbol, to be sure, is specific, but not what it symbolizes: man's situation in this world and in relation to other men.

The film begins with the explicit statement that it is a saga of the changing sea and the unchanging men upon it. In aesthetic substance, the sea is the whole external world, the forces of nature with which man must cope; just as the authority of the police and the captain is expressive of all the social constraints within which man's life moves, regardless of the particular features of his society.

Smitty is not permitted to jump ship, and shore leave is denied to every one. Does this not have the expressive content of the "no discharge in war" of Ecclesiastes—no escape from our humanity, from the constraints which the external world inevitably imposes on our private ones? And when the cargo is safely landed, the men find that they have nowhere to go but back to the ship, to sign up again. Is this not poignantly moving, not in the petty "realism" of how empty the satisfactions society allows men of their class and station, but in the more profoundly realistic sense that there is no other life than the present one, no place to live it but where we are? "Earth's the right place for love," the poet says: "I don't know where it's likely to go better." There is only the ship and the voyage.

And at the end of the film you know that although some of the men have gone home at last—Yank, Drisc, Smitty, and Ole—there is nothing for the others to do but resume the voyage, and it is the same voyage, and the voyage will go on and on, always with different men; perhaps the ship itself will change, but nothing essential in the situation will change. There will still be the struggle with the external world, there will still be the constraints imposed by authority, and there will still be the heartaches, frustrations, and also the recurrent gratifications which are just enough to give man the strength and courage to go forward.

This is not to say that every work of art is an allegory, that The Long Voyage Home is a kind of secular Pilgrim's Progress. It is not a question of allegory, or even of conscious and explicit symbolism. It is a matter only of expressiveness rather than restrictive representation, of giving to the arts the full richness of their meaning. (pp. 381-83)