The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey, or the monomyth refers to a basic pattern that is supposedly found in narratives from all over the world. Thus, one should be able, without fail, to create a compelling story using this structure. But, is this the case?

Joseph Campbell (the man who coined the term) argues that due to a psychological undercurrent specific to all humans, we are "hot-wired" to structure storied using the following 17 stages:

•  Departure
  • The Call to Adventure
  • Refusal of the Call
  • Supernatural Aid
  • The Crossing of the First Threshold
  • Belly of The Whale
• Initiation
  • The Road of Trials
  • The Meeting With the Goddess
  • Woman as Temptress
  • Atonement with the Father
  • Apotheosis
  • The Ultimate Boon
• Return
  • Refusal of the Return
  • The Magic Flight
  • Rescue from Without
  • The Crossing of the Return Threshold
  • Master of Two Worlds
  • Freedom to Live

This structure has since been reformulated several times by several different people. Nowadays it's used as a structure in Hollywood movies (scripts that don't have this structure -Syd Field's Paradigm-are rejected).
One of the most well know and successful examples of using this structure to write an award winning movies is George Lucas' "Star Wars". Lucas has admitted using this structure in the book "Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind" (Larsen and Larsen, 2002, pages 541-543).
This structure can also be applied to a variety of movies: "Godfather" , "The King's Speech", all of the "Harry Potter" movies, "Marly and Me", "Casablanca".
I believe that, because of the vagueness of the stages almost any movie (if not all of them) can be forced into this mould. This has given rise to criticism from various people stating that, by using the monomyth one loses all originality. Cliches thus become widely used and individuality is lost. Others, such as David Brin, claim that the monomyth was born out of cross-cultural similarities between cultures and was mostly enforced by kings and priest to justify tyranny. He points to science fiction as an antithesis to Campbell's monomyth (how valid this claim is is a point of discussion).


The monomyth works mainly because we as a species have defined what a story is (Aristotle is one of the first to try to give a structure for stories). Whether this is because of some deep rooted psychological reason or because of a natural and logical development of the story structure. There will always be people who claim to have a different set of rules and this is how it should be. Storytelling (like all art forms) is an every growing, ever changing process that will undoubtedly take on a myriad of different forms for as long as humans shall exist, neither being better or worse than the other, just different.