The Monomyth
Joseph Campbell in his book "The hero with a thousand faces" talked about the journey of the archetypal hero.
The main idea is that myths that are thousands of years old share the same fundamental structure that he called the monomyth. It is a sort of template that, in brief, begins with a hero going on an adventure, then having a crisis which leads to a decisive victory before ending with the hero returning home changed or transformed.
The main idea is that myths that are thousands of years old share the same fundamental structure that he called the monomyth. It is a sort of template that, in brief, begins with a hero going on an adventure, then having a crisis which leads to a decisive victory before ending with the hero returning home changed or transformed.
Campbell states that there are three main phases (or acts):
1 Departure - Leaving comfort zone to head out on adventure
2 Intitiation - Trials and quests and finding of boon (reward)
3 Return - Resurrection, atonement and return home
Some of the major stages are illustrated in the comic on the left. You can see a bigger version here.
As you can see in the image on the right (click to zoom), the monomyth has 17 stages beginning with Call to Adventure and ending with Freedom to Live.
It is interesting to note that the monomyth is cyclical so a story may not necessarily end at the Freedom to Live stage and there may be a new call to adventure.
The Harry
Potter series is a good example of this as every Harry Potter book features a
complete hero's journey, but it gains much more meaning in the larger hero's
journey that Harry travels over the seven books
As you can see, both George Lucas' Star Wars: A New Hope and the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix were strongly influenced by Campbell's work. Lucas read The Hero's Journey in college and used it as a tool to bring focu thereby drawing his vast invented universe into a single story.
This video details compares the stages of the hero's journey with examples from the The Matrix.
Finally, to illustrate how pervasive the hero's journey is in modern literature, look at the plot for Star Wars: A new hope with a few modifications to transform it into that of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone.
