In the introduction I justified assigning texts to different thematic categories on the grounds that casting the discursive net as widely as possible would help to grasp the full functional range of the wanderer motif. However, given the capacity of narrative to integrate the various discourses of its era, one should acknowledge that each text might well have been discussed from a different point of view. For example, in Heine's Harzreise political and anthropological discourses are intertwined, with the motif functioning as a point of contact between them. Thus, the protagonist's wandering in the Harzreise foregrounds the appetitive and sensual aspects of the individual as part of a critique of the ideology of renunciation. Although in each analysis I have placed the emphasis on a different discourse, the wanderers in the fictions studied here appear always as individuals at the focal point of intersecting discourses — aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, economic, and so on.

This is perhaps a useful point of departure to take in attempting to synthesize the findings of the foregoing study. Generalizing from the separate interpretations, we might say that the main role of the wanderer motif has been to reflect upon the vicissitudes of individuality in the nineteenth century, on the individual's possibilities for self-realization, on his (and here we have to do primarily — but not exclusively — with male, bourgeois individuality) hopes and fears, the social, economic, and institutional forces impinging on him, and his responses to them.