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"Now I Can Get Them Teeth"

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  As one embarks on a hero’s journey, their journey may not always be perceivable to others. This idea can be applied to the Bundren family in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying .  The novel is told through the Bundren family themselves as well as other characters like Tull, a neighbor; Armstid, a farmer; and Mosely, a drug-store owner. Through the non-Bundren perspectives, the family sure sounds like one chaotic bunch of clownish goobers. While the Bundren family as a whole may seem absurd, or at least the choices that they make are questionable, this does not mean that they can’t be considered heroes. For instance, take Anse. Anse is the one who makes decisions that tend to be the most problematic: He has his family cross a flooded river causing them to almost lose Addie, he pours cement on Cash’s broken leg only making it worse, and all this while, he is continuing to lug Addie’s rotting corpse around. As crazy as it sounds, however, if we look past his goober-ish decisions,...
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The Heroine's Journey Breaks Boundaries

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       Meet Michael: First Male Demon of the Heroine's Journey    Can immortal demons experience the hero’s journey? Even more so, can male immortal demons experience the heroine’s journey? I personally feel that this is not not possible, and for the sake of my double negative, we should again turn to the TV show, The Good Place , featuring Michael, the main demon . After years of laborious research and watching many episodes of The Good Place , I have found that Michael’s narrative seems to follow Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s heroine’s journey rather than the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey seems more influenced by outside forces, whereas the heroine’s journey is internally driven and each phase seems to be initiated by self agency.  Even at the beginning of the heroine’s journey, the heroine is in control. The first two stages are like prerequisites to her adventure, but both are summoned by the heroine herself. The first stage is the “Illusion of a ...
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What's Next, Joseph Campbell?

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    * Spoiler alert for The Good Place*      For most, the hero’s journey is fulfilled only by reaching the last step in the cycle, the Freedom to Live. In this final stage, the hero achieves a balance in life when they are no longer afraid of death and are “neither anticipating the future nor regretting the past” (“Hero’s Journey''). Pessimistically, however, I feel eventually this state would begin to lose its significance. I predict that after a while, the balance that had once accompanied the final stage will begin to tip back to a state of normal and gone is the glory of life in the cycle’s finale. Similar to when a dog finally catches its tail, but then realizes that it’s now stuck. So that I don’t sound completely radical (or rad…), one of my favorite TV shows, The Good Place, aligns with this thought: the idea that, perhaps, completing the hero’s journey does not govern the fulfillment of the quest. The Good Place features protagonist Eleanor Shellst...
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Siddhartha's Mid-Life Crisis

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Siddhartha is a complicated man with complicated existential problems, and we seem to accept this premise because it aligns with the hero’s journey narrative, and this English class is about the hero’s journey, so it all works out quite nicely. However, sometimes I wonder what would happen if we briefly removed the cloak of this narrative. Are we still left with the knowledgeable, wisdom-searching, rebirthing hero we all know and love? Or is Siddhartha really just a typical man encountering the journey that is life? How much of a hero is Siddhartha really? This question, I think, is the true inquiry to ponder. In the chapter “Samsara,” Siddhartha, after meeting Kamala, has been living with the ordinary for many years and is now struggling because he has lost the “glorious exalted awakening” that he had discovered two chapters ago (Hesse 76). He becomes too accustomed to the way the ordinary live: gambling with dice and learning how to “exercise power over people, to amuse himself with ...
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