Lake Toba Fictionalizations Through Indonesian Writings: A Literary Tourism Approach

Abstract

The beauty of Lake Toba in North Sumatra, Indonesia, not only attracts tourists to come but also inspires novelists to write their literary works. This study is an attempt to understand the fictionalizations of Lake Toba as setting places with references to three Indonesian novels, i.e., Situmorang’s Sordam (2010), Silalahi’s ToBa Dreams (2015), and Batu’s Tepi Toba (2019). This study focuses on how the three novels express the images of Lake Toba and its surroundings and the meaning of the similar and different expressions in a Lake Toba promotion context as a tourist destination. This study adopts an interpretive, qualitative method through a phenomenology paradigm. With a close reading technique, data are analyzed by employing a literary tourism approach with the support of the expressive theory. The findings reveal that the three authors express the images of Lake Toba and its surroundings romantically and critically. In addition to promoting Lake Toba as a tourism destination, both portrayals also help remind all stakeholders, including the government, local community, and visitors, to save Lake Toba and its surroundings from deforestation and water pollution. By investigating the fictionalizations of Lake Toba throughout novels based on the authors’ perspectives, one can increase their understanding of the importance of literary texts to the tourism industry.