Coming of Age

The inciting incident of the book Catcher in the Rye is Holden Caufield flunking out of his prep school for the fourth time. From the beginning, it is obvious that Holden's poor performance in school is deliberate; despite the excuses that he gives to his teachers, he often reads educational books, and is also very good at writing, at odds to his poor performance in History. Despite writing a terrible essay for Mr. Spencer (which is part of the reason he is being kicked out of Pencey), he is able to come up with a thoughtful composition for Stradlater (which he wouldn't receive any credit on). He does poorly in school because he only wants to learn things for the sake of learning-- he doesn't want to learn it for 'phony' reasons like recognition from teachers or having good grades. Holden only displays his knowledge when it won't bring him any sort of recognition or praise so that he can make sure that he is staying true to his ideals.  Holden sees doing work t...

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Almost all of the main characters in As I Lay Dying are incredibly strange from an outside perspective. Growing up physically and metaphorically separated from a lot of people, the Bundren family's idiosyncrasies are exaggerated. Anse's preoccupation with his teeth, laziness, and self-pity are strengthened by the other members of his family and neighbors doing all of the work around the farm. Vardaman's preoccupation with his mother as a fish is ignored by almost everyone, save for Darl, who encourages it and adds that Jewel's mother is a horse. Cash is perhaps the most normal of the family, and yet he throws himself into building the coffin, obsessing over making it perfect. To almost every outside perspective, the Bundrens appear cartoonish, disrespectful, strange, and often unsettling. The first point of view character who didn't know the Bundrens beforehand, Armstid, says in his chapter that the Bundrens "wouldn't even stay, and that boy chasing them bu...

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...

The Heroine's Journey template is not a useful tool for analyzing narratives, because it was written for therapy, instead of as a way to understand the journey of a character in a story as in Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey template.  The idea of the Heroine's Journey originated in 1990, with the publication of the book The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness Maureen Murdock as a self-help guide for women and therapists (Wikipedia). This meant that it was written with the intention of helping women go through a spiritual journey, rather than as a template for reading or writing narratives.  Despite this, it is still used as a means of reading stories. Perhaps the most egregious problem with using the Heroine's Journey (and the Hero's Journey to some extent) to analyze literature is that it flattens the unique and multifaceted aspects of the stories to fit with the steps of the template. The template of the Heroine's Journey rests on the a...

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 ...