Triangulation of Evidence

Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is a pattern said to be present in most stories, whether it is obvious or not. It involves particular stages that the hero, or protagonist, must go through to complete the story. These stages are known as ‘Separation’, ‘Initiation’, and ‘Return’. These stages themselves then hold much smaller stages, adding up to 17 altogether. Stories can often remove or rearrange certain stages and still be effective, as long as they have enough elements of the original Hero’s Journey ideal remaining and the story may imply these stages or elements in some other way instead.

Archetypes also play a very important role in the Hero’s Journey; Campbell talks about recurring archetypes present within a hero’s journey, and the roles that they play. This is heavily influenced by Jung’s archetypes that are “universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious”.

There are a few different definitions of ‘Hero’, involving simply the protagonist of a story, and a man who does deeds beneficial to others. Certain attributes are often associated with a ‘Hero’; courage, nobilities, superior strength and the ability to do things that ‘ordinary’ people can not. Campbell describes them as “is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms” (The Hero With 1000 Faces, page 19) and “The composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently he is honored by his society, frequently unrecognised or disdained. He and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolical deficiency” (Page 37). Many protagonists, or heroes in modern day media do not conform to all or a lot of these qualities, and stories now are not always as fantastic as the earlier myths that Campbell may have based his theories around. In Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey (1998), a condensed version of this theory was created to be more relevant to today’s audiences and to help structure stories within the Walt Disney company.

While some will insist that the hero’s journey is applicable to both male and female characters, there is still a lot of debate on the concept. Even just the fact that Maureen Murdock’s book The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, (1990) was written as a response to Campbell’s theories and that Campbell replied with “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” shows that male and female characters are not treated equally within the Hero’s Journey.

Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots (2004) states that every story comes from the same place and uses one of seven basic plots no matter what the journey is. Recurring characters are also an important part of this theory, holding different significance within each of these plots. He states that “Certain conditions must be met before any story can come to a fully resolved ending”(2004, pg 7). This theory is influenced by The Hero’s Journey, using many of the same elements and working well alongside it to describe the structure of a story.