Lonely Mountain
William H. Green calls the Lonely Mountain the fourth and final stage of Bilbo's education. He identifies multiple parallels and repetitions of structure between the stages, each one involving a journey, privation, and "unlikely escape". The Lonely Mountain stage, too, symbolically echoes the first stage in the Shire: before setting out, Bilbo was peacefully smoking a pipe of tobacco at his own front door; at the mountain, the smoke is the dragon's, and its meaning is anything but peaceful. The Christian writer Joseph Pearce views the journey to the Lonely Mountain as a "pilgrimage of grace", a Christian "bildungsroman", at its deepest level. Pearce states further that Bilbo's quest to the mountain parallel's Frodo's quest to a different mountain, Mount Doom, which he calls "a mirror of Everyman's journey through life".