The story is centered around travel, both horizontal—from Germany to Iceland—and vertical—from the sea level up to a mountaintop, back to sea level, and down beneath the surface of the Earth.

The horizontal displacement functions as a traditional travel motif. The trip becomes a pretext to describe unknown, exotic locales, offering readers who are unable or unwilling to undertake the journey a taste of adventure. Being on the road also creates the opportunity to question, disregard, or transgress from established social norms and hierarchies. In his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin theorizes that an encounter on the road can be deeply transformative (Bakhtin, M. M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, 1981). When traveling, people mix freely with others from all walks of life, becoming more self-aware. For example, Otto and Axel would never get to know or spend so much time with someone like Hans in the normal course of their lives. Additionally, if they had not undertaken the trip to Iceland, they would not have met the peasants who host them or experienced so many new things.