Treasure Island is not a book with a message; instead, it is an adventure tale, pure and (except for the character of its great antagonist, John Silver) simple. Yet like some other adventure tales, Stevenson's classic novel has as its central theme one of the oldest and most universal stories. Like the folktales of young men and women who leave their homes to seek their fortunes, the myth of Jason embarking to bring home the dragon-guarded Golden Fleece, the story of Odysseus on his hazard-filled journey back to Ithaca from Troy (and the concurrent journey of his son, Telemachus, searching for his father), and the medieval romance of Perceval seeking the Grail, Treasure Island is the story of a quest.
Treasure Island has an assortment of ingredients common to quest stories. The quest hero goes on a journey, often to a strange and dangerous place, in pursuit of something valuable. On his way, he encounters one or more threshold guardians — human, animal or even supernatural — that may try to keep him from gaining his object or may only provide tests that he must pass in order to approach it; some of these may be helpful figures and others may be adversaries he must defeat. The hero is forced to test his courage, intelligence, strength, and worthiness, and sometimes encounters evidence of previous seekers who failed the tests. Sometimes, rituals (magical or otherwise) are involved, initiating the hero into esoteric secrets. The successful hero passes each test and, in the process gains some internal good — often wisdom or self-knowledge — as well as the object he sought. (You can find many modern variations of the quest theme; Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is a quest novel in which the questing hero brings back an object now worthless — the skeleton of the great fish he caught — but also brings home a reassurance of his own strength.) The hero of such a story is often very young and innocent, in which case the quest is also a coming-of-age adventure. Jim Hawkins' quest for Flint's treasure fits this pattern admirably, which may be one reason Treasure Island is so enduringly popular; some schools of psychology hold that the pattern is a figurative reflection of universal human experience and that such stories are thus deeply satisfying to readers at an unconscious level.
