THE QUEST

In all great historical stories and myths, there is a difficult quest that the main character must endure in order to find his answers.

A quest is a long or arduous search for something important.

In the series, various characters were looking for answers but few were truly on a quest.

Locke was an angry, lonely child - - - bounced from foster home to foster home. He had no father. He had a crazy mother. He longed to be popular, but his intelligence outcast him to the geeky group in school. Throughout his life, he turned away from applying his natural talents in order to chase the illusion of grandeur of the high school jock, or adventurous outback hunter. In the show, Locke continued on his fantasy illusion, not finding answers but running into the same societal judgments and roadblocks that angered him so.

Sayid was also an angry child - - - having to do the dirty work for his older brother. He was the one who became tormented by family honor to become a self-hating soldier. He knew he could not fit into normal society because his training had created a monster within him. He ran away from his homeland, feebly chasing a vision of his dream girl, but only to wind up in a miserable place with people weary of his background and his purpose.

Sawyer was also an angry child - - - having his parents killed by a con man's greed set him on the path of revenge. Finding the man who ruined his life became an obsession that ruined Sawyer's own life. Instead of learning from the experience, he became what he hated most: the con man. In the show, Sawyer never changed his self-preservation mode.

Most people believe the LOST mythology best suits Jack. Jack was a child who wanted the attention and admiration of his father. But he never got it. This void motivated Jack to become a miracle worker surgeon. And that got nothing from his father but criticism. So when his father died suddenly, Jack had no means to get the acknowledgement from his father. He was lost in his own psychic pit of growing despair. It was on the island that Jack chased the ghost Christian to find an answer to the hole in his heart. But in the end, the long journey led Jack not to an answer, but to a cruel, unfortunate death. There was no grand revelation. There was no grand moment of enlightenment.

It does not fit the classic pattern as used in Star Wars. Luke is also a lonely child, his parents gone. He is living on a desert planet doing mindless work. He has no prospects and has no adventure if he stays on his home world. But once his family is killed, he is set on a course to fight against the tyranny of the Empire. He joins forces with an old wizard and slowly learns the way of an ancient religion, to grasp and combine with the Force to defeat his enemies. Along his journey, Luke meets up with a cast of misfits, royalty and evil masters - - - so he has to confront danger, and defeat it in order to protect the people he cares about. Luke overcomes his sparse upbringing to become an enlightened Jedi Knight.

Jack's journey does not have all the elements of Luke's. Jack is not transformed into an enlightened individual. He would have met up with his father in the after life no matter what happened to him on the island. The people in the church were people he knew from the island, but they did little to mold him into a better person (some would say his island experience threw him into deeper darkness and despair). And what did Jack find in the end? The anti-climatic twist was that he was dead, everyone was dead, and it was time to "move on."