Coming of Age

 In Fun Home, Bruce has an "awesome capacity for cognitive dissonance" about his family. He wants them to be like the perfect families in his books — with a mother and father who fell in love at first sight who live in a richly furnished house. At the same time, Bruce cheats on his wife with young boys, and focuses more on the looks of the house rather than the people living inside of it. Although we don't know what he is thinking, he doesn't seem to be aware of the dissonance between his actions and expectations.  The phrase "awesome capacity for cognitive dissonance" is used to describe Bruce on page 199, when he talks about Mr. Antolini turning out to not be a good friend because he makes a 'pass' at Holden. He talks about this to a class that includes a student that Alison implies he is sexually involved with. If he is aware of his parallels to Mr. Antolini, he never shows it. Instead, he seems to think of himself as similar to Fitzgerald, his fa...

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...

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...