The Hero's Journey
“You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else’s path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else’s way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work
Joseph Campbell, an American mythological researcher, wrote a famous book entitled The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In his lifelong research Campbell discovered many common patterns running through hero myths and stories from around the world. Years of research lead Campbell to discover several basic stages that almost every hero-quest goes through (no matter what culture the myth is a part of). He calls this common structure “the monomyth.”
By adapting his classic model to contemporary texts, students can analyze the literature through the lens of the Hero’s Journey and gain a better understanding of the 4 classical hero types encountered in content area texts: Epic Hero, Arthurian (Chivalric) Hero, Tragic Hero, and Romantic/Byronic Hero.
Source: Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972. Print.