Essay On Gilgamesh Hero

Gilgamesh a hero? According to Joseph Campbell, “[a hero] must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable,” as said in his classic book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. As explained by Campbell, a hero usually begins with an adventure due to someone or something that has been taken from them, or feels that there is something missing in their normal life. Then that person takes off and goes on a journey full of adventures that are beyond the ordinary to try and recover what he/she lost or even to discover something new, “it’s usually a cycle, a coming and a returning,” (Joseph Campbell). In a television series named The Power of Myth, Campbell has a conversation with Bill Moyers, a journalist, and states that “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” Time has passed and many things have changed. Religion, morals, traditions, laws, and entertainment have all changed, and continue to change. This also applies to the definition of hero. In Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh did not possess the qualities that would meet the American or even the world’s standard of a hero. A hero in modern day is a person or a character …show more content…
I believe this is very selfish. Gilgamesh shows the love he had for his friend, his brother, by making a statue of him but that is all he can do, nothing else. A true hero would maybe make a big ceremony for his companion and talk about how much help that person was and how he/she was a hero too. However, he decides to embark on yet another journey but this time he wants to find Utnapishtim, a mortal who becomes a God. He embarks on this journey to ask Utnapishtim about death and how to become a God, and even though he did go thorough a lot in this challenging journey, I can not find the hero in