Zygmunt Bauman believes that vagabonds or vagrants offer an apposite metaphor of the postmodernist.

What keeps vagabonds moving is their disillusionment with the last place of rest and the hope that eventually the right locale will be found to give them a long-awaited sense of meaning. But meaning is never achieved, though the wandering continues; the postmodernist is a vagabond, like a pilgrim without roots or destination, ‘a nomad without an itinerary’.

The tourist is another metaphor. The tourist lives without any commitment to, or any in-depth social or spiritual encounters with, the people he or she sees while travelling.

Ultimately it is a dehumanizing experience: ‘One thing that the vagabond’s and the tourist s lives are not designed to contain, and most often are excused from containing, is the cumbersome, incapacitating, joy-killing,  moral responsibility.’