A Thousand Faces Hero's Journey

Joseph Campbell was the author of The Hero With a Thousand Faces , a novel which outlined the idea of the hero’s journey. His novel identified the common patterns that were found in most myths, stories and spiritual traditions. Campbell expanded this knowledge by creating a detailed framework that identified the twelve stages of the hero’s journey. His guidelines provide an accurate description of the hero’s journey, as proven in many popular stories and it is clearly presented in the South African movie Tsotsi. Tsotsi is the story of a young gangster from the slums of South Africa. The movie follows the journey of Tsotsi, who begins to turn his life around after a series of unexpected events.
The twelve stages of the Hero’s journey begins with the Ordinary World. In the case of Tsotsi, he was a local gangster in the slums of South Africa. He and his gang members Aap, Butcher and Boston mugged people on a regular basis as it was their only source of income. Tsotsi was a man of little things and he had no …show more content…
In the movie, scenes of his past were shown in order to represent the losing of his innocence and how it had affected him in his daily life. For example, the first flash back happened when Tsotsi was running after his fight with Boston. The kept switching between child Tsotsi and present Tsotsi running representing that they were feeling the same emotions of regret and anger during that time. Fast forward in the movie, the next flashback shows the reason why child Tsotsi was running that night. Tsotsi’s father had gotten in a drunken rage because Tsotsi had gone to see his terminally ill mother. In retribution, his father had assaulted the family dog breaking his back. After seeing his father’s violence, Tsotsi decided that it was better to leave. For the rest of his childhood, he lived in a set of large concrete pipes inhabited by other homeless children until his descent into gang