This paper talks about how Updike Underhill, the protagonist-narrator of Royall Tyler’s novel 'The Algerine Captive', seeks a full understanding of his own country by removing the beloved object of his analysis from himself. Through a long journey that takes him elsewhere, he grasps the rich complexity of reality and finally comes to accept the totality of his country in its positive and negative aspects. Thus Royall Tyler indicates expatriation and the comparison with the elsewhere as appropriate means to know the United States better. This nationalist feeling is the underlying key-note of the whole book and one of its main themes. Explicitly or implicitly Tyler speaks of America even if he is describing British or Algerian realities and his narration sometimes wavers between praising and criticizing his native land. With the last sentence of the book, “By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall”, Tyler underlines the necessity for a voluntaristic rather than naturalistic nationalism for the United States and gives his main contribution to the developing American thought and fiction writing.
