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Coming-of-Age

 All posts from this point on are for Coming-of-Age novel

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The Impact of Deviating From the Hero's Journey

In the billions of stories that exist on this planet, it is not surprising how many of them deviate from the structure laid out by Joseph Campbell in the Hero's Journey. However, what is surprising is the lasting popularity of stories that feature flat characters (who are supposed to be the bane of writers everywhere). In fact, character-driven stories have only been popular relatively recently — think of how modern fairytale rewrites like  Cinder  or  Land of Stories  treat the characters compared to the originals. Somehow, despite the two-dimensional nature of their protagonists, many stories with little character growth are still wildly popular. By the time of Joseph Campbell, character development was considered an integral part of a good story. And yet, characters like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty have stayed in the cultural consciousness despite their lack of personality or character growth. The power of not having character growth like in the Hero's Jour...
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Achilles and the Hero's Journey

Joseph Campbell, as a comparative mythology scholar, is best known for his work codifying the Hero's Journey story structure. He proposed the idea of a 'monomyth', or a common template that follows a hero going on an adventure and returning, changed that is present in all stories.  Campbell split the monomyth template into 17 steps. Not all of the steps are always present, and the steps may not always be in the same order, but they are typically divided into three larger sections, or acts: the Departure (or Separation), the Initiation and the Return (1). These steps symbolize the hero's descent into the unknown adventure as well as their eventual return to the world they know. One of the epics that greatly influenced the idea of the monomyth was the Iliad. The Iliad is a piece of ancient Greek epic poetry. The journey of Achilles, as told in the Iliad, follows the Hero's Journey steps set out by Campbell.  Both the Iliad and the Odyssey most likely originated ...
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Esther Greenwood and the Miraculous Recovery

Even before Esther is officially deemed fit to be released from the asylum, she knows that the bell jar that had been suffocating her before had lifted. Although she doesn't know for certain whether it will ever return, she feels newly empowered to continue with life. The reason for this is that she no longer has the looming pressure of people expecting her to be great in the future. These expectations that people had before of Esther were a major part of why she attempted to commit suicide. Esther was a high-achieving, straight-A student who was able to go to college through the many scholarships that she earned. She is able to skip being graded on a required class because of everyone's belief that she would have aced the course anyway. As a result of her previous achievements, she begins feeling pressure to be great even after graduating college, which she's not sure how to do in the absence of grades and papers. During her New York internship, when Esther realizes for th...
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