Note · Language and writing
What is the hero's journey? The story pattern, explained
The hero's journey is a story pattern Joseph Campbell described in 1949: a hero leaves home, is tested in a strange world and returns changed. Its stages, and the case against it.
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Contents · 6 sections
The hero's journey is a pattern of story in which a hero leaves the ordinary world, is tested in an unfamiliar one, wins something and comes home changed. The mythologist Joseph Campbell set it out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, calling it the monomyth and claiming that myths across the world share it. Screenwriters later turned it into a twelve-stage template, and it shaped films from Star Wars to Disney's animated features.
In short
- Campbell described 17 stages in three acts, departure, initiation and return, and Christopher Vogler simplified them into 12 for screenwriters.
- George Lucas said he drew on Campbell for Star Wars, which follows the stages closely.
- Folklorists argue Campbell found the pattern by choosing the stories that fit it; most writers now treat it as a tool, not a law.
What did Joseph Campbell actually claim?
Campbell, who taught literature at Sarah Lawrence College, summed up the whole pattern in one sentence near the start of his book: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." He drew his examples from everywhere he could: the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Odysseus, Native American and African tales. He borrowed the word "monomyth" from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake.
His claim was larger than a pattern in plots. Influenced by the psychologist Carl Jung, Campbell argued that the journey reflects something in the human mind: leaving childhood, facing fear and death, and returning with something to give. That is why, he said, it recurs in cultures that never met. He wasn't the first to look for a common hero story. The psychoanalyst Otto Rank had proposed one in 1909, and Lord Raglan listed 22 traits of the traditional hero in 1936, but Campbell's was the version that spread.
What are the stages of the hero's journey?
Campbell's 17 stages fall into three acts. In departure, the hero hears a call to adventure, often refuses it, receives help from a guide and crosses a threshold into the unknown, sometimes swallowed up in "the belly of the whale". In initiation, the hero faces a road of trials, meets allies and tempters, confronts a father figure or a supreme ordeal, and gains a prize, "the ultimate boon". In return, the hero may resist going back, flee with the prize, be rescued, and finally cross home again as "master of the two worlds", free to live. Not every myth has every stage, and Campbell said so; some stories dwell on a single one.
In the 1980s, Christopher Vogler, a story analyst at Disney, wrote a seven-page company memo, A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that recast Campbell for screenwriters. It is credited with influencing Disney films of the early 1990s, including The Lion King, on which Vogler worked. He expanded it into a book, The Writer's Journey, in 1992, and his twelve stages are the version most people now learn.
How does Star Wars follow the hero's journey?
George Lucas has said that he deliberately shaped Star Wars on Campbell's pattern. After making American Graffiti, he said, he began reading mythology, "and I started reading Joe's books," and while reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces he "began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classical motifs". Mapped stage by stage onto the 1977 film, Vogler's twelve fit closely:
| Vogler's stage | Campbell's act | In Star Wars (1977) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The ordinary world | Departure | Luke Skywalker works on his uncle's farm on the desert planet Tatooine |
| 2. The call to adventure | Departure | A droid plays Princess Leia's recorded plea for help to Obi-Wan Kenobi |
| 3. Refusal of the call | Departure | Luke tells Obi-Wan he can't get involved; he has work on the farm |
| 4. Meeting the mentor | Departure | Obi-Wan gives him his father's lightsaber and speaks of the Force |
| 5. Crossing the first threshold | Departure | His aunt and uncle are killed, and he leaves Tatooine on the Millennium Falcon |
| 6. Tests, allies, enemies | Initiation | The cantina, Han Solo and Chewbacca, training with the lightsaber |
| 7. Approach to the inmost cave | Initiation | The Falcon is pulled into the Death Star |
| 8. The ordeal | Initiation | The trash compactor, then Obi-Wan's death |
| 9. The reward | Initiation | Leia is rescued and the Death Star's plans escape with them |
| 10. The road back | Return | Pursuit by fighters, and the flight to the rebel base |
| 11. The resurrection | Return | The trench run: Luke trusts the Force and destroys the Death Star |
| 12. Return with the elixir | Return | The medal ceremony; the rebellion survives |
The fit is good partly because it was built in. In The Power of Myth, the conversations with Bill Moyers broadcast on PBS in 1988, Campbell agreed that the trash compactor works as his "belly of the whale", the hero swallowed and reborn. A pattern found in a story written with the pattern in hand shows that the pattern can be used, not that every story contains it.
Why do some scholars reject the monomyth?
The strongest criticism comes from folklorists, the scholars who collect and compare traditional stories for a living. The folklorist Barre Toelken wrote that Campbell "could construct a monomyth of the hero only by citing those stories that fit his preconceived mold, and leaving out equally valid stories" that did not. Alan Dundes, one of the best-known American folklorists, called Campbell a "non-expert", pointed to bias in the sources he chose, and faulted the media for presenting him as an authority on myth.
Still argued
Whether the hero's journey is universal, a deep feature of human storytelling, is argued. Campbell's admirers point to how often its shape appears, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Odyssey, and to how readily audiences respond to it. Critics reply that the stages are so loose that almost any story can be made to fit, which makes the theory hard to test; that the selection was biased toward the stories that matched; and that it describes mostly a lone, usually male hero who goes out and comes back, leaving out stories built on community, endurance or cycles without return. Maureen Murdock's The Heroine's Journey (1990) proposed a different pattern for women's stories. What the evidence supports is narrower: the pattern is common in many traditions and has been deliberately copied in modern popular stories, which makes it influential, whether or not it is universal.
Comparative mythology has generally moved away since Campbell from single universal patterns toward the differences between traditions. Many beloved stories don't follow the journey at all: a comedy of manners, a mystery, a tragedy in which the hero never returns.
How do writers use the hero's journey?
As a diagnostic, mostly, rather than a recipe. A writer with a draft that sags in the middle can ask which stage is missing or weak: Is there a real refusal, so the hero's choice to go matters? Is there an ordeal that costs something? Does the hero come back changed, carrying something to give? Vogler himself presents the stages as a set of questions about character and change, to be reordered, skipped or repeated.
The risks come from following it too closely. A story that hits each beat on schedule can feel predictable, and audiences who have seen many such films can feel the template under the scenes. The pattern works best when the outer adventure tracks an inner change: Luke learns to trust himself, not just to fly. The journey belongs with the other tools of storytelling and persuasion, such as the ones laid out in what rhetoric is. Campbell built his case largely on the stories in Greek mythology and the religious traditions, and the wider question of how humans came to tell stories at all starts with what language is.
Check yourself
- Close the page and name the three acts of Campbell's pattern, with one stage from each.
- Why does Star Wars fitting the pattern so closely say little about whether the pattern is universal?
- What is the main objection folklorists make to the monomyth?
Sources
- Hero's journey — Wikipedia
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces — Wikipedia
- Christopher Vogler — Wikipedia
- Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey — Joseph Campbell Foundation
- Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, episode 1: The Hero's Adventure — BillMoyers.com, 1988