The Hero's Journey

I will now share the concept I hinted to in the last journal entry. It is known as monomyth, or the hero's journey. It is a basic pattern that its proponents argue is found in many narratives from around the world. This widely distributed pattern was described by the late American mythologist, writer and lecturer Joseph Campbell. I first learned about this concept back in late middle school.

He described it in his 1949 nonfiction book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In it, Campbell discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world mythologies and other tales.

Since the book's publication, Joseph Campbell's theory has been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. The best known is perhaps George Lucas, who has acknowledged a debt to Campbell regarding the stories of the Star Wars films. Other works that have this theme that Joseph Campbell identified include many of the mythical Greek tales, and the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.

If you take a look at this concept yourself (since I don't want to spoil anything), you will see who this whole thing really works.