Alistair Campbell

The idea of the hero’s quest is an archetype of literature; it occurs countless times in the history of stories. Many believe that any and all stories follow the path of the hero’s journey. The movie Excalibur includes multiple hero journeys, but the most prominent one is that of King Arthur. By mistake, Arthur successfully attempts to remove the sword Excalibur from the stone, symbolizing that he is the rightful king of the land. This sets him on the task of acquiring respect and recognition,…

Joseph Campbell once wrote, “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself,” and the hero’s journey is divided into three separate parts: departure, fulfillment, and return. Though at first glance, Suyuan Woo, from Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, doesn’t appear to meet this definition of a hero, she actually satisfies it by devoting her life to improving her daughter’s life. Suyuan’s early life is spent in Kweilin, in the midst of the second Sino-Japanese war.…

A hero’s journey is the steps of a process in which a hero is trying to accomplish a goal. However, the journey is about more than just completing their goal, they also find themselves and who they want to be. The hero encounters many obstacles throughout their journey that changes their view on the world and sometimes even their goal that they have worked so hard to strive for. In the book the Odyssey, the main character—Odysseus, went through his own hero’s journey. Along his journey home, he…

In every great novel, there is bound to be a tempest, the best friend, and the grand adventure in which there is bound to be a battle of some sort. The Monomyth and temple pattern has been seen throughout various movies and books around our culture. Fahrenheit 451 is no exception to the pattern. Among the three compilations of The Hearth and the Salamander, The Sieve and Sand, and Burning Bright, we as a reader travel through the monomyth journey alongside Guy Montag to show the adventure’s…

Mythology is best known for creating symbolisms behind the circle and giving human-like qualities to god-like figures. The circle is a symbol with no beginning or ending. Such is true with mythologies that reference the circle and its symbolic meaning. In mythology, the circle can represent anything from the process of being born, breathing your last breath, and being reborn, to the never-ending process of the classical elements of the world; water, fire, earth, and air. These four elements of…

Campbell begins his explanation of the hero’s journey by revealing the first step of his monomyth, The Call to Adventure. The call can not be seen as physical nor as musical, instead it can be viewed as every person's tether to the universe and when the universe pulls that tether, it demands the attention of those it calls. The universe should not be seen as tyrannical however, for it calls a person to adventure not to be cruel but to bestow the knowledge that a rite of passage must soon be…

Every hero goes through a journey cycle, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, et cetera et cetera. Each of these heroes’ journey cycle has an effect on the theme of their respective stories as well as helping to develop their plots. James Dashner’s novel, The Maze Runner, helps express this statement as Dashner utilizes the hero’s journey in order to introduce and develop the theme of his novel, while employing the hero’s journey in a way that helps form his plot in an intriguing way.…

Myth is a primeval way through which every culture defines its character and offers a way to understand the world. Humans use myth to describe and understand “archetypal or universal significance” (Cupitt, 1997, p.5) and to establish their perception of cultural experiences. Different cultures have their own myths that systemise their human experience as “one of the functions of myth is to convert numinous indefiniteness into nominal definiteness and to make what is uncanny familiar and…

The Delineation of Heroes in Literature Prevalent in this culture, much of humankind has indisputably become increasingly favorable to one another whether it is of concern within a smaller collection of individuals or in a bigger societal sense, with this deriving from not only a moral obligation but also the evident presence of physiological empathy, ultimately emphasizing the rise of heroism. For the purposes of elucidation, one must first explore the concept of a hero. There are three…

Cabin Number 15 One day, some construction workers decided to build a campsite for kids close to the graveyard and the fishing lake in the forest. A construction worker said that the cabin that they built closest to the graveyard will be cabin number they each didn’t like. They came up with number fifteen. So after they built the whole camping site for kids, the whole place was a huge hit! With kids 7-15. Two years later... two girls complained that strange things were happening in cabin…