Phileas Fogg

In “Around the World in 80 Days” by Jules Verne, there are several main characters, but my favorite of them is Phileas Fogg. The reason for this is because of the way he conducted himself in the book, as dozens of times he was delayed, heled up, or even left behind, but not once did he lose his temper, in fact he did not show any feeling of disappointment whatsoever, he just calmly did what he could to get back on track. To grasp this great character you would have to read the book, but here are two of my favorite parts displaying his character, the first is from chapter XX:

 “Mr. Fogg then learned that the Carnatic had sailed the evening before. He had expected to find not only the steamer, but his domestic, and was forced to give up both; but no sign of disappointment appeared on his face, and he merely remarked to Aouda, "It is an accident, madam; nothing more."

Another example is found in chapter XXXIV, when he had just been locked in prison:

“Did escape occur to him? Did he examine to see if there were any practicable outlet from his prison? Did he think of escaping from it? Possibly; for once he walked slowly around the room. But the door was locked, and the window heavily barred with iron rods. He sat down again, and drew his journal from his pocket. On the line where these words were written, "21st December, Saturday, Liverpool," he added, "80th day, 11.40 a.m.," and waited.”

From these two sections, it is seen that Mr. Fogg has an amazing amount of self control, and if he had lost his temper and panicked in those situations, I doubt that he could have made it around the world in eighty days! Today a lot of people do not have much patience and they seem to get stirred up by the slightest things, but Mr. Fogg had 20,000 pounds at stake, and he did not lose control once. I think that we could all practice a little more self control in our lives. In the book of Proverbs, King Solomon says, “Better a patient man than he who takes a city,” what I think this means is that we are better off being patient in the things that we do rather than rushing them, because if we rush, we are very likely to become careless and miss something. Looking at the end results we see that if someone is trying to do something as fast as they can and someone else is doing the same thing, but doing it carefully and paying attention to the details, the most likely result is that the person rushing the project will probably finish much faster but his quality will pale in comparison to the one who took the extra time. Throughout the book “Around the World in Eighty Days” Phileas Fogg shows admirable character that we can all learn from.